Ship Transits | Cargo | |
2023 | 14,080 | 511 million tons |
2015 | 13,874 | 331 million tons |
1965 | 11,834 | 71 million tons |
1915 | 969 | 5 million tons |
To build the Panama Canal, 56,000 workers dug a trench 41 feet deep across 48 miles of peninsula, including a rock ridge 275 feet high and 8 miles across. Over eight years, they moved 177 million cubic meters of earth and rock weighing half a billion tons. When it opened at the end of June 1914, the Gatun Locks — the largest concrete structures ever built until the 1930s — could lift and float ships up to 965 feet long and 106 feet wide. This meant nearly all world shipping, and transit time from New York to San Francisco fell by half. As a quick table shows, the Canal opening by itself equaled the logistical effect of replacing sailing ships with steam a generation earlier, and maritime technology has needed a century to halve passage time again:
Clipper ship record, 1854 | 89 days |
Pre-Canal steamship record, 1900 | 59 days |
Panama Canal average, 1920s | 30 days |
Current | 15 days |
A century later, with the Canal grew too narrow and shallow to accommodate for the world’s largest ships, the Panamanian government’s $5.2 billion expansion project moved another 52 million cubic meters of earth and stone. Its conclusion at the end of June in 2016 deepened the navigation channels and opened new locks on the Pacific and Atlantic (180 feet wide and 60 feet deep, as compared to Gatun’s 110 and 42). The result hasn’t had quite the epochal shipping impact of the original, but has raised cargo volume by about 60%, from about 300 million tons of cargo a year in the early 2010s to 510 million tons a year since 2016. Before the re-digging, the largest ship the Canal could handle was a “Panamax” vessel of 52,500 deadweight tons; now it’s able to handle LNG tankers en route to Asia, and 14,000-TEU container ships coming east.
Another aspect of the two excavations, and the century separating them, illustrates not only logistical progress and engineering achievement but human progress.
Visionary 19th and early 20th-century projects took a large toll. The initial French attempt to build the Canal in the 1880s, before the discovery of the mosquito vector for yellow fever, proved beyond the reach of 19th-century technology and failed at the cost of 22,000 lives. The successful early 20th-century American effort wasn’t much safer: 5,609 of the 56,000 workers — mostly recruited from Barbados, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands — died over the eight years of construction. The Canal Commission’s 1910 report, as a typical example, records 548 employee deaths, including 376 from disease (especially yellow fever and malaria, despite energetic efforts to control mosquito breeding), and 164 from industrial accidents including dynamite explosions, railroad accidents, electrocutions, drownings, and “accidental traumatisms, various.”
The expansion program’s record, telescoping a century’s worth of public health and worker-safety policy development, is a remarkable change. We haven’t found a detailed worker mortality report of this type for the last decade’s expansion program, but (a) an online source of uncertain reliability, quoting an official at the 2016 conclusion ceremony, says there were seven, and (b) an ILO workplace death and injury table suggests that the whole of Panama averages 4 to 6 workplace deaths a year among its 2 million workers. Sometimes things do get better.
* TEU: “twenty-foot equivalent unit,” the acronym used to describe the number of twenty-foot shipping containers a vessel can carry.
Today:
The Panama Canal Authority has current cargo statistics.
… and an explanation of the expansion project eight years later.
Perspective from the U.S. Embassy/Panama City.
And live camera at the five Locks.
Looking back, with a human perspective:
The Canal Commission’s massive labor recruitment on Barbados is said to have brought 40 percent of the island’s working-age men to Panama, and cut the population from 200,000 in 1900 to 172,000 in 1910. The total workforce added 12,000 from the United States, 16,000 from other Caribbean islands, and 8,000 from Europe and Latin America to the 20,000 Barbadians. A tenth of them died during construction – 5,609 people, including 4,290 Caribbean workers – of yellow fever, malaria, landslides, explosions, railway accidents, and other illnesses and workplace injuries. By country, the Canal Commission’s 1910 death toll included 167 workers from Barbados, 113 from Jamaica, 49 from Martinique and Guadeloupe, 60 from other Caribbean islands, 48 from Spain, 36 from Colombia and Panama, and 31 from the United States.
“We Were Giants” — Barbados remembers the 20,000 at the 2014 Canal centennial.
Perspective from Smithsonian Magazine on labor recruitment, segregation in the Canal project , and health policies.
NIH reflects on the achievements and flaws of the Canal builders’ yellow fever and malaria control program.
And as a primary source, the Isthmian Canal Commission’s 1910 report; see Appendix P for statistics on worker health, mortality, and disease control.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.