Save the Cruces Trail and Panama Canal Watershed

Masterful marketing, which focuses on profit potential and avoids technical issues, has created the perception that – when completed – the Panama Canal Expansion will work well and business will grow robustly. That has resulted in a speculative boom in Panama . However, on its present course, the expansion will lead to a catastrophically different outcome. Today’s project needlessly jeopardizes the canal’s economic future and threatens critical ecosystems. It also creates expectations it will fail to meet. Bidding on lock design and construction has encountered repeated delays, as was predicted. Issues normally resolved when assessing lock proposals – a typical first-step this world-important engineering project omitted – have contributed to those delays, validating concerns voiced at the project’s outset. Independent assessments predict that, unless changed, this one-lane expansion will severely restrict the canal’s growth potential, plus curtail the capacity ...