The BBC has taken note of the ITF’s concerns about safety on the new Panama Canal locks:
A Chinese container ship has hit a wall of the recently-widened Panama Canal, amid concerns that it has less space for manoeuvres and could be unsafe.Mechanized ‘mules’ pull ship through the previously existing Panama Canal locks. The new locks do not use mules.
Workers’ groups say the new locks are too small for safe operations now that the canal can take ships three times larger than before.
In the old canal locks locomotives (known as ”mules”) keep the ships correctly aligned as they passed through.
A study for the International Transport Workers’ Federation released earlier this year concluded that the new lock chambers were too small for the tugboats to be able to manoeuvre properly.
This is the third accident of this kind since the multi-million dollar expansion opened a month ago.
