ALMOST 100 years after it became a world landmark in engineering, the Panama Canal is on the brink of an overhaul.

Although the first modern path across the isthmus, a railway built in 1855, was built using cheap Chinese labour, it is now the rise of China as an economic superpower that is fuelling the £4 billion expansion.

The canal, 50 miles (80km) of water stretching north to south across the sinuous land bridge connecting North and South America, gently lifts about 12,000 vast cargo ships a year up 26m (85ft) through a system of locks, man-made lakes and cuts, depositing them in either the Pacific or the Caribbean. But with a new generation of super-container ships on the horizon, running on exacting timetables across the world, the canal is now showing its age.

President Torrijos of Panama and canal officials are to host a meeting today to unveil plans to add more giant locks and another shipping lane.

Given the cost of such projects, and the impact of the canal on the tiny Central American country’s economy, any plans have to be submitted to a national referendum before work can go ahead. Polls show that 56 per cent of Panamanians favour the expansion.

The work will entail a deepening of the canal by 1.2m and the construction of two huge three-step locks at either end to accommodate the next generation of mega-ships, according to Jorge Quijano, the maritime operations director of the canal. Another channel is expected to be excavated to bypass the alternating one-way system in parts of the canal.

Alberto Aleman Zubieta, the director of the Panama Canal Authority, said: “The Panama Canal, as it was built in 1914, is getting very close to capacity, that is the most important aspect of this, that the canal is working at 94 per cent of the capacity that it has today.”

Ships inching through the canal currently carry about 4,500 containers. The behemoths of tomorrow will carry up to 10,000.

But there is still little trace of modernity in the towering lock houses and wharves, where specially designed locomotives run alongside ships, using taut steel cables to keep them from scraping the concrete walls. Inside the Miraflores Lock control tower on the Pacific, the floodgates are still operated by the original brass equipment installed when the canal was opened 92 years ago, although the system is due to be computerised this year.

Part of the excavation for the planned locks was started by the Americans in 1939 but was halted by the outbreak of the Second World War.

The scale of the planned expansion has made some observers nervous about the investment. “My concern is mainly financial,” said Fernando Manfredo, a former canal authority director. “To make such an investment of such a magnitude, depending on future traffic projections, it involves a risk. Panama has a very fragile economy and I don’t think we should assume such a risk.”

Señor Manfredo said that counting on the continued boom of a China still under the control of the Communist Party was an added worry.

Señor Quijano, however, does not share such concerns, and said that the plan would probably use revenue from canal users to finance the expansion. “It seems that China will continue to grow . . . so there is a lot of volume of cargo that’s going to be moving from China to the centres of consumption. For our particular case, it is the East Coast and Gulf coasts of the United States,” he said. But with container ships already paying about £100,000 per transit, critics worry that any added costs may discourage future clients.

The Spanish first used the route across Panama to haul their looted Inca gold from Peru and Ecuador, an arduous trek that as long ago as 1534 inspired King Charles V of Spain to envisage the construction of a waterway linking east to west.

More than three centuries later in the 1880s, the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the sea-level Suez Canal, tried to blast a similar waterway through Panama.

It was only after two French companies went bankrupt and about 22,000 workers died of tropical disease that he gave up and sold the rights to the Americans. Instead of carving a channel through the rock, they built dams and locks to create a stepped waterway at a fraction of the cost.

They also backed Panama’s independence from Colombia and created a US sovereign canal zone that was fully returned to Panama only six years ago.

GOING WITH THE FLOW

• Because the French set the resale price for the canal project so high, the original American plan was to build the canal through Nicaragua
• That plan was derailed by the assassination of the President, William McKinley, in 1901. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, backed Panama
• During the construction of the canal, 152.9 million cubic metres of debris were removed
• The first vessel to travel down the canal was a floating crane, called the Alexander La Valle, which made the journey with no fanfare on January 7, 1914
• The official inaugural crossing was undertaken by the SS Ancon on August 15, 1914
• In 1928, Richard Halliburton paid 36c in tolls to swim the length of the canal in 10 days
• During each crossing of a ship, 52 million gallons of fresh water are washed into the sea
• Before the canal was built, a 17th century British privateer, Henry Morgan, whose galleons destroyed the original Panama City, crossed the jungle of the isthmus on foot. His men suffered such hardship that they ate their own shoes in Panama City

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