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CENTRAL AMERICA |
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Panama Canal Expansion Work to Begin in
January
PANAMA – Construction of a new set of
locks for the Panama Canal will begin in
January, the consortium that holds the
concession for the expansion project said.
“We’re at the beginning and there are a lot
of bureaucratic hurdles, presentations to
make, permits to acquire. The real work
begins in January,” Antonio Zaffaroni,
executive director of the GUPC consortium,
said on Friday.
He added that for now it is all about
“preparation, relocating the animals,
cutting down the trees.”
Zaffaroni said the first phase of the
project will involve excavation work, as
well as setting up “the installations for
producing concrete, crushed stone, cement
and equipment for unloading the supplies.”
GUPC, a consortium led by Spanish company
Sacyr Vallehermoso, won the contract to
build a third set of locks for the canal,
beating out several other contenders with a
$3.1 billion price proposal.
The proposal was the lowest offered among
the three consortiums participating in the
final phase of the bidding and was under the
$3.4 billion ceiling set by the Panama Canal
Authority. GUPC also won out because it
received the highest score in a technical
evaluation.
Regarding the doubts raised about the
difficulty of completing the work at that
cost, Zaffaroni said that at this time there
is “no cause for concern.”
“Our budget is lower due to our better
technical rating ... having studied the
project well, (our budget) was lower because
transport cycles, construction methods were
optimized,” he said.
The international consortium, which also
includes Italy’s Impreglio, Belgium’s Jan de
Nul and Panama’s Constructora Urbana, will
have 1,883 days – about five years and two
months beginning Aug. 25, 2009 – to complete
the project.
Construction of the third set of locks is
considered the big prize in the Panama Canal
expansion project, a huge undertaking
estimated to cost $5.25 billion that still
has one project remaining to be put up for
bidding.
The canal, designed in 1904 for ships with a
267-meter (875-foot) length and 28-meter
(92-foot) beam, is too small to handle the
“post-Panamax” ships that are three times as
big, making it necessary to expand by
building the new set of locks.
The Panama Canal Authority, the government
agency that manages the waterway, wants to
double transit capacity.
The 80-kilometer (49-mile) canal, which
currently handles about 5 percent of world
trade, has been under Panamanian management
since Dec. 31, 1999, when the United States
surrendered it in keeping with the 1977
Torrijos-Carter treaties. |
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