By: Staff Writer
March 8, 2024
The drought in the Panama Canal is so severe, it is down by five feet of its original level, signaling that trade may be affected for years to come if it remains this way throughout the Spring.
Unlike the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal is fed by a freshwater lake, Lake Gatún, and its water level is falling critically low.
After a choppy boat ride across Lake Gatún, Nelson Guerra, the Panama Canal Authority’s hydrologist, points toward a rusted ruler beneath a tower on the western end of the water.
“The level, as you see on the rulers, is 81.20ft,” he says. “The level should be five feet more than now.”
On the return journey, the boat passes old tree stumps sticking out of the water. They were never fully cut down during the original construction of the lake. Normally, only a few would be visible at this time of year. But half way through the dry season, there’s a forest of them.
But on the other side of the globe, another key shipping route — the Panama Canal — has a serious problem of its own: not enough water.
Gatún Lake is the huge reservoir in the middle of the Panama Canal. At the hydrology stations there, it’s Nelson Guerra’s job to obsess about water levels. He’s the Panama Canal Authority’s hydrologist.
“The level, as you see on the rulers, is 81.20 feet,” he said. Normally, it should be “5 feet more.”
The Panama Canal Authority’s first ever chief sustainability officer, Ilya Espino de Marotta, says they are working on finding solutions to ensure the canal does not run out of water.
“We don’t want this to be a recurrent issue. We don’t want to drop transits or tonnage,” she says.
The authority has been busy developing a plan to invest $8.5bn in sustainability projects over the next five years that it hopes can help the vaunted waterway survive, even as changes rock the planet.
Addressing the changing climate, Ilya Espino de Marotta says: “Panama is a very rainy country… but we see there’s a [reduced rainfall] pattern coming that is impacting everywhere. So we definitely need to prepare for the future.”
One obvious measure involves water conservation.
The Panama Canal works by transiting boats through a series of above-sea-level locks fed by Lake Gatún and the smaller Lake Alajuela.
Each ship that passes through the locks uses around 50 million gallons of water, and a handful of new locks built in 2016 – the larger Neo-Panamax locks – save 60% of that water.
The lack of water at the Panama Canal is causing a global headache. The number of vessels that can pass through here each day has been slashed from 36 to 24.
José Cervantes from shipping company Agunsa said that this shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans is the natural route, and that, if it’s blocked, alternatives are needed. That would mean more time and additional costs — costs that are passed on to the consumer.
“These canals allow us to navigate at an inexpensive price — quick delivery times, which is so important,” said Christian Good, a farmer from Macon, Mississippi. “But without those canals, it really adds time.”