panama city, miraflores locks

Image and footage of a ferry in transit...the ship is a flea compared to the usual freighters passing through. The widest of ships leave a mere two feet to each of the locks' walls. I'm going to try to hitch a ride up the canal as a "line handler" in the next few days before I move on to Colombia. I realize that the Panama Canal doesn't quite fall in line with the other case studies I've adopted so far in terms of scale or urban interaction...but it's damn interesting and impressive so I'll just stick it in the BF Infrastructure category for now and have a good time with it.

It doesn’t organize Panama City with small-scale sophistication (it's more like a raison d'etre) but, for such a gargantuan gesture, the Panama Canal seems surprisingly ambiguous. It is not the Lay-Z-River Sharpie slash that I imagined. Instead, the canal is a nexus of infrastructures—from dams to locks to railway lines to freight vessels—that relies on an intimate relationship with Panama's topographical and ecological peculiarities.
I happened to visit during the rainy season, which means chronic dampness and oppressive humidity. Such weather isn’t conducive to daytime activity (nightlife is another story), but the canal depends on this inordinate amount of precipitation for its viability. Daily deluges descend on surrounding swathes of spongy jungle. Dense root networks minimize soil erosion and corresponding dredging requirements. From rain forested slopes, water coalesces in Lake Gatún, an artificial lake 26 meters above sea level that is maintained by three dams. This lake stores the water needed for all the lock operations. There are no pumps. The Panama Canal’s locks operate gravitationally to flush about 26 million gallons of freshwater into the Pacific and the Atlantic per use. As long as the reservoir isn’t overtaxed it’s an incredibly efficient system…and one that is about to get more efficient when a more sophisticated and water-saving set of new locks are completed in the next few years.