With thick jungle on both sides and water surging through stone locks below, the ship moved through the passage built almost a century before, designed to cut weeks and months off shipping travel time between continents.
In 1990 I was barely into my 20s, too young to really appreciate transiting through the Panama Canal. I had no knowledge of the history I was witnessing, of the more than 20,000 men who had died trying to build a short water link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans – or what it would one day mean to the US commercial real estate industry.
As the forward lookout on the US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Luce (DDG-38), I remember starting off that morning anchored off the fog-covered coast of Colombia. The 24-hour water trip through the country’s middle was pretty amazing. The rainforest jungle lined both sides –where thousands more men died more of mosquito-borne malaria and yellow fever than accidents – at times close enough to almost touch.
Late that night, I commanded the lee helm (the ship’s speed – think “All ahead full!” from the movies) during our night docking in an island in Gatun Lake. The next day, the majestic Bridge of the Americas was a fitting entrance to the Pacific Ocean.
The designers of the canal had no idea of the cargo traffic that would one day pass through – about 300 million tons per year today, more than four times what engineers in the late 19th century estimated a canal could effectively handle.
The locks were already expanded from the planned 94 feet wide to 110 feet wide before construction to allow larger US Navy vessels to go through.
In 2006, construction by Panama Canal Authority began again for even more widening, to open exactly 100 years after the canal was finished in 1914.
The authority’s Third Set of Locks project will double the capacity of the canal. Many think this is needed to keep the bigger ships coming through. Though there are doubters that China can sustain its dramatic growth, a recent industrial market study by Cushman & Wakefield estimates imports and exports will increase dramatically in the next decade from China to the East and Gulf coasts.
Industrial experts also expect a shift in port use, with the now-popular Los Angeles/Long Beach and Houston ports losing out to ports such as Miami and New Jersey.
Benefactors of this shift should include industrial warehouse and distribution real estate professionals, especially in middle America, as intermodal activity will expand and increase to bring more products through new overland paths, necessitating additional storage and delivery facilities.
It’s true there are internal negative pressure in the current commercial real estate shipping market, with new fulfillment centers for Internet companies seeking modern space rather than old, manufacturing centers closing and remaining vacant, and spiking gas prices.
I can say from experience: as our ship moved glided through what once had been solid rock, it proved to me that ingenuity will triumph over adversity. I think it may start slow, but by mid-decade the $6 billion Panama Canal expansion should have a lot more to say about growth of our nation than just the long ditch we dug many years ago.
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