Spanish, Mexican, Costa Rican Companies Win Panama Canal Contract
December 24th, 2009 | by admin |
A consortium made up of Spanish construction firm FCC, Mexico’s ICA and Costa Rica’s Meco has won a Panama Canal dry-excavation contract with a $267.8 million bid.
The consortium beat out Belgium’s Jan de Nul, Brazil’s Oderbrecht and the ISC Panama consortium to win the contract, the second most lucrative of the $5.25 billion canal expansion plan.
According to the specifications laid out by the Panama Canal Authority at the start of the bidding process, the project involves excavating a new channel that will link a new set of locks – yet to be constructed – with the Gaillard Cut, the canal’s narrowest stretch.
The winning consortium offered to carry out the dry-excavation work for a total cost of $267,798,795, well below the $294,913,000 offered by ISC Panama, which finished runner-up.
This was the last bidding process of the canal-expansion plan and will involve the excavation and removal of some 27 million cubic meters (951.6 million cubic feet) of material.
The work will involve opening a 6.1-kilometer (3.8-mile) access channel as well as the construction of a large earth and rock dam with a watertight clay core.
PCA administrator Alberto Aleman Zubieta told Efe Tuesday that the idea is for this latest dry-excavation project to be completed by 2013. The entire canal expansion is due to be finished in 2014.
In July, a consortium led by Spain’s Sacyr Vallehermoso construction company won a $3 billion contract for the third set of locks for the Panama Canal.
The canal, designed in 1904 for ships with a 267-meter (875-foot) length and 28-meter (92-foot) beam, is too small to handle the “post-Panamax” ships that are three times as big, making it necessary for some time to expand by building the new set of locks.
The Panama Canal Authority, a government agency that manages the waterway, wants to double transit capacity.
The 80-kilometer (49-mile) canal, which currently handles about 5 percent of world trade, has been under Panamanian management since Dec. 31, 1999, when the United States surrendered it in keeping with the 1977 Torrijos-Carter treaties.
