With Chinese Investment, Nicaraguan Passage Could Dwarf Panama Canal

Nicaragua is now home to the early stages of one of the largest infrastructure projects on earth, plans for which have been raising questions for some time now. In a move that will affect global trade in the long term, "A Chinese telecom billionaire has joined forces with Nicaragua's famously anti-American president to construct a waterway between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean to rival the Panama Canal. The massive engineering undertaking would literally slice through Nicaragua and be large enough to accommodate the supertankers that are the hallmark of fleets around the world today." (Here's a related article with a bit more on the project from Wang Jing, the Chinese telecoms entrepreneur now also at the head of the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co.) One potential problem with the canal: disruption of surfing in Nicaragua.

Re:Money pit

[Stargoat]

I think you might want to review your history. The first French attempt under La Société internationale du Canal interocéanique almost brought France to its knees. It also was in large part responsible for a disturbing wave of antisemitism that swept France, as Jews were blamed for so much of the corruption.

A Nicaragua canal would in many ways be better than a Panama canal. Although the distance is quite a bit longer, there would be less of a need for locks than are used on the Panama canal.

Re:Chinese telecom billionaire

[Ralph Wiggam]

It's a one party state where that one party is the Communist Party.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping started economic reforms that transitioned China from a Maoist country full of subsistence farmers to the economic powerhouse it is today. To be truly Communist, the state has to own pretty much everything. Their new model allows individuals to own lots of things, and profit from them, but the state retains control when they want it.

Geography of panama vs nicaragua

[camg188]

A quick look at google maps and I estimate
Panama is about 40 miles across and about 150 feet (65 k, 40 m) of altitude to overcome.
Nicaragua is about 150 miles and about 650 feet (240 k, 200 m) of altitude to overcome. The altitude difference would add a lot to operating expenses. They'd have to pump a lot of water to locks about 600 feet higher than in Panama.

Environmental impact: sea snakes in the Atlantic

[FridayBob]

If the Nicaragua canal does not contain any locks, as does the Panama canal, one particular sea snake species, Pelamis platura [wikipedia.org], will almost certainly enter the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean where there are currently no sea snakes. So far, Pelamis and other sea snake species have been prevented from entering the Atlantic due to the cold waters in the north and south, the higher salinity of the Red Sea and the system of locks and fresh water of the Panama Canal. If the isthmus of Central America is breached by a lockless canal, I see no reason why P. platura (just this one snake species) and many other unwanted tropical denizens of the Pacific will not make it through to the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, while many from the Caribbean will get through to the Atlantic. In other words, without any locks, this will be a recipe for an environmental disaster. Let's hope I'm wrong and they're planning to build a minimum set of locks anyway.

Very very old news

[coldsalmon]

Lake Nicaragua was considered for a canal even before Panama. The idea has been picked up and dropped many times since, which is not to say that it won't succeed this time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]

Re:Money pit

[westlake]

The Panama canal nearly bankrupted America.

Nonsense.

The Panama Canal cost Americans around $375,000,000, including the $10,000,000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 paid to the French company. It was the single most expensive construction project in United States history to that time. Fortifications cost extra, about $12,000,000.

Amazingly, unlike any other such project on record, the American canal had cost less in dollars than estimated, with the final figure some $23,000,000 below the 1907 estimate, in spite of landslides and a design change to a wider canal.

Even more amazing is that this huge, complex and unprecedented project was carried out without any of the scandal or corruption that often plagues such efforts, nor has any hint of scandal ever come to light in subsequent years.

There was, of course, also a cost in lives. According to hospital records, 5,609 lives were lost from disease and accidents during the American construction era. Adding the deaths during the French era would likely bring the total deaths to some 25,000 based on an estimate by Gorgas. However, the true number will never be known, since the French only recorded the deaths that occurred in hospital.

END OF THE CONSTRUCTION [pancanal.com]

Re:Panama Canal took 33 years, 4 countries

[stdarg]

These kinds of concerns are why the high speed rail "project" (I hesitate to call it that.. more like "pipe dream") near where I live has been in planning and environmental impact studies for 10 years, whereas the Chinese estimate for building the whole canal is 5 years.

This project, even if it fails miserably, will create more jobs and pump more money into the economy than surf tourism would in 100 years I wager. The canal budget is 4 times the entire GDP of Nicaragua. What percent of GDP does surf tourism provide?

Re:Interesting

[R3d M3rcury]

One of the things most people see as a bug but I see as a feature with China is their ability to just do things. There's no debate, no fighting with Congress, etc...they can just tell millions of people to move out of the way [...]

Which is fine--if you're not one of the millions of people.

Back in the late 90s, my roommate went back to Vietnam to visit some friends. She went back to the house she grew up in and discovered that almost all of the people who lived there had moved away. Why? Because the street they lived on was across from a hospital and it was tough for the ambulances to get in. So the government decided they were going to widen the street. So they told everybody, "Hey, we're widening the street and you may end up losing the front 6 feet from your house. Sorry about that." No wasting money buying property or law-suits or anything like that. Just a "You're fucked. Move on."

Of course, there's not much for disclosure rules, either. So what everybody did was sell their place to the next sucker in line and get out fast. Of course, once those people found out, they did the same thing.

What's funny is that had been going on for three years. The government still hadn't shown up to widen the street. In fact, when she went back in 2012, they still hadn't widened the street.

I kinda like that part of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution about "[...] nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Yeah, it does gum up the works for worthwhile infrastructure projects, I agree. But I'd rather not wake up one morning and find the house that I live in is going to be part of a freeway and I'd better move...

Re:think big, plan for future

[AK Marc]

I worked with a ship that needed a year delay for a trip. We just missed the "good weather" for going around South Africa, and the Suez has height restrictions that prevented the ship from going that way (what idiot put low power lines over a canal?). So a nice long wait to go from China to Europe. Had there been another route, we could have gone east, but the weather is still an issue going around capes, and the Panama Canal is slow and expensive. But it was at least physically capable of handling the load, just not cost effective, compared with waiting for a good weather season for a run around the cape.