this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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The Panama Canal announced Saturday it will reduce the maximum number of ships travelling the waterway to 31 per day, from 32 in August, due to a drought that has reduced the supply of fresh water needed to operate the locks.

That compares to daily averages of 36 to 38 ships per day under normal operation.

Nine ships per day will be allowed to use the new, bigger NeoPanamax locks and 22 per day will be handled through the older Panamax locks.

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[–] ArcaneGadget@lemmy.world 20 points 2 years ago (11 children)

With the amount of money, the Panama canal must make; why the flip do they not have backup pumps to hoist water back up into the reservoirs? Old timey dutch windmills would even work...

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 38 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

The most powerful pump in the world would take a half hour to fill a Panama Canal lock from the low level to the high level (by contrast, the gravity-fed system takes only ten minutes to fill it from the lake). That pump is called the Pentair Fairbanks Nijhuis HP1-4000.340; coincidentally it actually is in the Netherlands, and it's used to control flooding. It cost about $1B (USD) and took over three years to install.

The Panama Canal would need twelve of them; one for each lock. At a total cost of over one billion dollars, the installation would suck up almost a sixth of the nation's GDP; and each time you filled a lock with one, the electricity alone would cost another $22,400. That means over a quarter of a million dollars for every ship that goes through the twelve locks, which means another $2.5m per day to send ten ships through (and note that number— it would also bring along with it a 66% cut in the possible revenue that the canal can earn from current levels, which are already half of their designed rate) because the slower moving pumps would take three times as long to cycle a lock.

Are there ways to mitigate some of this? Certainly. But I'm trying to communicate the scope of this massive problem that you're dismissing here. I'm sure they've thought about every angle, since it's something like 40% of their GDP.

[–] zephyreks@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Why not pump straight to a top-level reservoir?

[–] ebc@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 years ago

There already is a reservoir, it's called Gatun Lake. It's not filled using pumps, though, it's filled from the rain.

That rain is what's the problem right now, there's not enough.

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