Expanded Panama Canal locks to open in June 2016
Excerpts from the Wall Street Journal:
The Panama Canal Authority has started taking reservations for transit through the canal’s new wider, deeper locks, which are slated to open June 27.
Many of today’s oceangoing vessels are too big to fit through the 100-year-old waterway’s locks, some stretches of which taper to as little as 110 feet wide. In a statement Monday, the Canal Authority said the first reservation through the new canal was granted to a 120-foot wide liquefied petroleum gas tanker owned by Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha, known as NYK Line.
On the first day of accepting reservations, 25 mega-vessels that wouldn’t have fit through old locks were able to reserve passage through the new, wider canal.