panama canal expansion Geology has also played an important role in making the achievement possible. ACP Geotechnical Engineer, Manuel Barrelier, explained that the excavation was above existing phreatic levels and involved weathered rock and residual material. The two, he said, contributed to ease of work and therefore increased the excavation rate – the first material type required less blasting for fragmentation and the second required none at all.
final stage Barrelier, who was also involved in the final stage of the second Culebra Cut widening project (1992-2001), admitted that although the magnitude of dry excavation is considerably larger than in the 1990s, PAC-4 is an exceptional case. “Back then, an excavation project of one million cubic metres was extraordinary. We used to assume monthly produc-
tion of 150 thousand cubic metres for those projects. But PAC-4 came and went beyond all those numbers,” he says. Nearly 26 million cubic metres of material will be excavated under PAC-4, a volume larger than the other three dry excavation contracts combined,. And it must be completed by August 2013. ACP’s Project Engineer Fernando Alvarado emphasised the importance of the million cubic metres excavated during two consecutive months. “It cuts back the execution time for the dry-excavation component as scheduled and keeps us within the project base line,” he said. The contractor is now expecting the arrival of additional equipment before the end of Panama’s dry season to increase production even further and to complete Panama Canal Expansion Programme’s second largest and complex project within schedule.
ABOVE: The contractor deployed a significant amount of heavy equipment, which allowed for the excavation of the additional 15,000 cubic metres of material per day. OPPOSITE: In this project, a total of 26 million cubic metres of material has to be excavated by August 2013
CARIBBEAN MARITIME I MAY - SEPTEMBER 2011
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