Panama Canal Expansion Works Employ 9,000 Workers

9,000 Workers Employed

The Panama Canal expansion works, which Sacyr is carrying out in consortium with Impregilo (Milan: IPG.MI – news), Jan de Nul, and Constructora Urbana, currently employ 9,000 workers, according to the Spanish company, which reports that "work is progressing at a good pace."

The group is currently undertaking the final phase of earthworks for the project, with more than 32 million cubic meters excavated, and has already installed and made operational all industrial facilities, such as the power generation plant and the concrete production plant.

As for concreting, the consortium reports that approximately 90,000 cubic meters of concrete are being produced per month at each of the work sites (the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts), which, according to its data, constitutes a world record.

The final phase of the project is "the most technological and complex of the work" and consists of manufacturing the 16 gates for the new locks and their drive equipment, as Sacyr details in its internal magazine ‘Dimensión’.

Currently, the first four gates are being assembled, one of which is already finished. These are structures 58 meters long, 10 meters wide, and 30 meters high, weighing 4,000 tons.

The first four gates are scheduled to travel from the Italian factory where they are being built to Panama in the spring of this year.

In parallel, last January the first 47 valves arrived at the work site as part of the electromechanical equipment that will regulate the flow of water between the chambers, the culverts, and the water reuse basins that will operate in the new locks.

These locks will require a total of 158 valves, in addition to 84 bulkheads and 328 debris traps. Hyundai Samho Heavy is in charge of their manufacture in South Korea.

The Panama Canal expansion works, which the Sacyr consortium secured in July 2009, consist of building a third lane of locks that will be added to the two currently in operation. The canal will thus double its cargo transport capacity to reach approximately 600 million tons annually.