Panama Adding a Wider Shortcut for Shipping
By HENRY FOUNTAIN NY TIMES

COCOLÍ, Panama — For now, the future of global shipping is little more than a hole in the ground here, just a short distance from the Pacific Ocean.

Ah, but what a hole it is.

About a mile long, several hundred feet wide and more than 100 feet deep, the excavation is an initial step in the building of a larger set of locks for the Panama Canal that should double the amount of goods that can pass through it each year.

The $5.25 billion project, scheduled for completion in 2014, is the first expansion in the history of the century-old shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific. By allowing much bigger container ships and other cargo vessels to easily reach the Eastern United States, it will alter patterns of trade and put pressure on East and Gulf Coast ports like Savannah, Ga., and New Orleans to deepen harbors and expand cargo-handling facilities.

Right now, with its two lanes of locks that can handle ships up to 965 feet long and 106 feet wide — a size known as Panamax — the canal operates at or near its capacity of about 35 ships a day. During much of the year, that can mean dozens of ships are moored off each coast, waiting a day or longer to enter the canal.

The new third set of locks will help eliminate some of those backlogs, by adding perhaps 15 passages to the daily total. More important, the locks will be able to handle “New Panamax” ships — 25 percent longer, 50 percent wider and, with a deeper draft as well, able to carry two or three times the cargo.

No one can predict the full impact of the expansion. But for starters, it should mean faster and cheaper shipping of some goods between the United States and Asia.

Dean Campbell, a soybean farmer from Coulterville, Ill., for instance, expects the expansion will help him compete with farmers in South America — which, he said, “has much poorer infrastructure for getting the grain out.”

The canal expansion “will have a definite impact on us,” Mr. Campbell said. “We think in general it will be a good thing, we just don’t know how good.”

Jean Paul Rodrigue, a professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University who has studied the expansion project, said that the shipping industry was waiting to see how big the impact would be. “They know it’s going to change things, but they’re not sure of the scale.”

For now the hole, parallel to the existing smaller Pacific locks and about a half-mile away, is a scene of frenetic activity by workers and machines laboring in the tropical haze. At one end, giant hydraulic excavators scoop blasted rock into a parade of earth movers that dump it topside on a slowly growing mountain of rubble. At the other, where the machines have finished their work, a pack of about 50 men buzzes over the rock floor, preparing it to serve as a foundation for a bed of concrete.

That slab will be one small building block for the immense structures to come: three 1,400-foot-long locks, water-filled chambers that will serve as stair steps, raising or lowering ships a total of 85 feet. An identical set of locks will be built on the Atlantic side.

Once an Atlantic-bound ship leaves the new Pacific locks, it would join the existing canal at the Culebra Cut — an eight-mile channel through the continental divide — and then steam across Gatún Lake to the new Atlantic locks for the trip back down to sea level. In all, the 51-mile passage will take about half a day, as it does now.

The expansion is being financed with loans from development banks to be repaid through tolls that currently reach several hundred thousand dollars for large ships. The project is huge by Panama’s standards; among other things, the country’s largest rock-crushing plant has sprung up, almost overnight, to turn the mountain of excavated rubble into sand and stone for the concrete.

It is hardly the biggest infrastructure project in the world, “but this is the one that has the most foreign impact,” said Jorge L. Quijano, an executive vice president of the Panama Canal Authority, which has operated the canal since the United States handed it to Panama more than a decade ago. “And I think it is the one that has the most impact on the United States.”

And perhaps on other nations: some of the largest ships that currently serve Europe by traveling through the wider Suez Canal in Egypt may begin using the Panama route.

But the impact will probably be greatest in the United States, the destination or origin of about two-thirds of the goods that pass through the canal.

Like the construction of the original canal, an engineering masterpiece that opened in 1914 after 10 years of work by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the expansion project is a daunting task, but for different reasons.

The corps had to tackle tropical diseases that had killed thousands of workers during an earlier failed effort by the French. It had to excavate — and, crucially, dispose of — tens of millions of cubic yards of dirt and rock. And it built locks that were then the world’s largest.

“They were the best engineers in the world, ever,” said Alberto Alemán Zubieta, the chief executive of the canal authority. “Today I’ve got computers, technology, super equipment. Those guys did this in 10 years, under the most difficult conditions ever.”

The biggest questions today concern whether, in a country and region marked by official corruption, the canal authority, an autonomous agency of the Panamanian government, can handle such an undertaking. Panama’s vice president, Juan Carlos Varela, was reported to have privately called the project a “disaster” in 2009, according to an American diplomatic memo made public last year by WikiLeaks. Mr. Varela described the main contractors, Spanish and Italian firms, as “weak.”

But authority executives say they have had nothing but support from the government. They claim that the project is on time and under budget, and that the authority has the engineering and management skill to complete it.

Some outsiders agree. “We are quite impressed with how the project is being run,” said Byron Miller, a spokesman for the Port of Charleston in South Carolina, which is spending $1.3 billion over 10 years on improvements to handle the additional cargo from the canal and other routes.

Expansion of the canal was first proposed in the 1930s to accommodate large United States warships, and excavation for larger locks began in 1939 but was stopped during World War II. The current project was approved in a national referendum in 2006.

Deeper approach channels are being dredged on both coasts. And on the Pacific side, crews are excavating a long channel that will connect the new locks to the Culebra Cut. The channel through Gatún Lake is being widened so that larger ships can pass each other.

The new locks, which will account for about half the cost of the project, will work on the same principle used by the existing ones: moved solely by gravity, water is fed into or emptied from the chambers, raising or lowering the ships inside. But the new locks will use a different kind of gate at the end of each chamber, which should make maintenance easier and less disruptive. They will also have a feature found on some canals in Europe: three shallow basins next to each lock that will store water and reuse it. With the basins, the new locks will use about four million fewer gallons of water for each ship’s passage through the canal than the much smaller existing locks. Even so, to ensure there is enough, the project will raise the level of Gatún Lake, which supplies the water for the locks, by about a foot and a half.

Water use would not seem to be much of an issue in rain-soaked Panama. But Gatún Lake serves as a drinking water supply as well. And the water level has to be monitored so there is enough stored for use by the canal during the dry season, roughly January to April. If the level is too low the authority has to reduce the amount of water for each passage, which means the deepest-draft ships cannot use the canal unless they unload some cargo.

Water quality is an issue as well. The new locks and basins will allow more saltwater into Gatún Lake, although the canal authority insists that the effect will be small and that steps can be taken to mitigate the problem if necessary.

The water-saving basins, with an elaborate system of culverts and valves to divert water to and from the chambers, may be the project’s most technologically challenging part. Operators will use computer controls that are a far cry from the electromechanical ones, with brass and glass indicators and chrome valve handles, that were used from 1914 until just a few years ago.

Despite the system’s complexities, Mr. Quijano, the canal authority official, insisted that the authority was capable of carrying it out successfully. “We have not invented anything that has not been invented before,” he said.

Mr. Alemán, the authority’s chief executive, also expressed confidence in the project’s overall success, saying his managers draw lessons from those who worked a century ago. “We have a very high standard to live up to,” he said.

Inside the Salahi Split

White House party crasher Michaele Salahi has reportedly left her husband for a rock star. Diane Dimond, who spent countless hours inside the couple's home, on why she's not surprised.

by Diane Dimond  Daily Beast

 That Michaele Salahi has reportedly left her husband and, for now, gone to be with Neal Schon  , guitarist for the rock band Journey, didn’t surprise me one bit.

Schon, Michaele once furtively told me, was one of the true loves of her life. Long ago, as she dated both Schon and Tareq Salahi simultaneously, she had to make a difficult decision. She chose to marry Salahi on Nov. 1, 2003 because she thought life with him would be more tranquil than living with a rock star. She wistfully wondered aloud to me last year if she had made the right decision.

 

During my research for the book Cirque Du Salahi  , I probably spent more concentrated time inside the Salahi’s home than anyone ever had before or since. As an eyewitness to their private lives I saw the cracks in this marriage back in the early summer of 2010 when I travelled to rural Linden, Va., to get to know the couple who, by then, had been branded worldwide as “The White House Gate Crashers.” I wanted the story behind the story and they agreed to speak to me exclusively.

I came to learn a lot about this odd couple whose infamous party crash ultimately landed them on Bravo's Real Housewives of D.C. series.On the surface, the platinum blond Michaele (pronounced Mah-kell) is exactly as the TV show portrayed her—girly, bubbly, animated, and prone to bursts of hugging near strangers and declaring, “Oh, I love you!” She eats junk food nearly all day (chocolate is her constant companion) and never seems to add a pound to her slender frame. As my book also revealed, Michaele has silently suffered nearly 20 years with multiple sclerosis. The public saw less of Tareq (pronounced Tark) during the solo season of the program, and when he was shown it was often in a negative light. He was portrayed as Michaele’s protector, but also as a bully to other Housewife castmates and their husbands.

The Salahi’s overriding concern during my time with them was their lack of money. They ruminated about whether the Real Housewives show would go into a second season. At that point they were ensnared in a longstanding feud over control of the family’s Oasis Winery so they no longer realized income from the business that had supported them over the years.

Only in private moments would Michaele openly speak about Neal Schon.

One day when I arrived to pore over documents and photographs at their dining room table, Tareq announced to me that nearby road construction had severed their Internet lines. I learned later that their service had been shut off for lack of payment. Their cellphones no longer worked and they worried they would soon be evicted from their tri-level home. They were also battling several lawsuits filed for unpaid bills. It was a life in sharp contrast to the way Bravo had featured the couple on TV, staging them, for example, in the back of a limousine as they pretended to shop for multimillion-dollar mansions.

During my weeks in Virginia, spending countless hours inside their home, touring the family vineyard, going out to meals with them, it was easy to see Tareq drives the bus in their relationship. I noticed that Michaele would go along to get along—sometimes catching my attention and giving me a silent eye-roll in reference to her husband’s behavior. She’d make an excuse that we were going to make a Starbucks run for hot chocolate and she and I would have time for girlfriend talk.

Only in private moments would Michaele openly speak about Neal Schon. As I wrote in the book, she had a long love affair with him, sneaking away from work as a cosmetics consultant in Virginia to travel with him and the band. Photographs of the two Salahis together during this time show a couple comfortable and happy in each other’s arms. Not even Michaele’s mother, with whom she was very close, knew about her years with Neal. Her mother still hoped she’d get back with Eddie, her college sweetheart.

Tareq, the privileged son of a once-wealthy vineyard owner and the head of a Montessori school, has a natural talent for marketing, and I saw him wheel and deal a neverending set of schemes to capitalize on his wife’s Real Housewives connection. He took calls and emails to set up big splashy events at which Michaele could be featured. He tussled frequently with Bravo executives who demanded he take their logo off his unauthorized promotional material. If Michaele tried to offer an opinion, Tareq’s temper would flare and she would become submissive. When plans were made for Michaele to travel with the cast to Los Angeles for the semiannual Television Critics Association's press conferences, he demanded a first-class ticket, too.

“Michaele needs me to travel. She can’t carry bags, she gets weak and she falls down from the MS,” he told me in an urgent tone. But the Salahi's had never revealed her medical condition to Bravo and the TV executives had no way of knowing her needs.

Michaele confirmed she had fallen down walking long airport corridors in the past. Her doctor told me the financial and family stress in her life had caused her MS to flare and left her vulnerable. Her mother, Rosemary Holt (never a fan of Tareq’s) worried she would end up like Annette Funicello, who had been confined to a wheelchair with the disease. Still, Tareq’s almost panicky tone in describing why he had to go to Los Angeles too made me wonder if he might have been more worried about being left behind.

In the end, Tareq got to go to California with his wife thanks to a back-door deal he negotiated for a free airline ticket. While at an event at a posh Beverly Hills restaurant, which just happened to be packed with journalists who had covered the TCA tour, Tareq got into a shouting match with nemesis Housewife Lynda Erkiletian and tossed a glass of red wine at her, ruining her couture dress. As one columnist later asked, “Was it a publicity stunt or sincerely bad behavior?” A bit of both, I thought to myself. Tareq just doesn’t seem to have an internal barometer to help him distinguish between what is acceptable and what is not.

The Salahis told me that once my book revealed her multiple sclerosis to the world they hoped Michaele could become a national spokesperson for MS. A laudable goal, yet after the trip to California I heard talk about a much different direction for her future.

Tareq and others had cooked up a deal for Michaele to pose for Playboy They’d planted tantalizing tidbits about it with TMZ and other gossipy websites. “I really don’t want to do it, Diane,” Michaele whispered into the phone to me, “but the money could help us keep the house. I guess if it’s done tastefully…” and her voice trailed off.

During a promotional tour for Cirque du Salahi, the couple and I were often booked on the same TV and radio programs. While visiting New York, Tareq thought it would be a good idea if they appeared on an Internet radio show that broadcast from a gentlemen’s club. Michaele asked me privately if she should expect “drunk, old, leering guys” to bother her. At one point she tearfully told me during a phone call that Tareq’s sour moods and their legal and financial problems were overwhelming. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take!” she said.

There was also a brief stint for Michaele on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s TV show Celebrity Rehab, filmed in Los Angeles. Several people close to the situation tell The Daily Beast that Michaele was cast after Tareq convinced producers that his wife suffered from a bona fide addiction. Besides her penchant for chocolate I couldn’t imagine what that might be. Sure enough, she was tossed from the show within a matter of weeks. A furious Tareq went to the media again with his intention to sue and to “blow the lid off reality TV.”

Then there were the low-level fashion and charity events Tareq would advertise on their mutual Facebook page, including an event to open a bowling alley in Bethesda, Md. And there was the embarrassing photo op of the almost 47-year-old Michaele on TMZ posing with a baby crib. An earlier TMZ story screamed, “We’re Gonna Have a BABY!”  with the opening line that the Salahis were “on the hunt for a nice clean womb ... because the alleged White House crashers are planning to have a baby through a surrogate mom!!!” I thought the story was particularly cruel since Michaele had put off having a baby because of her MS.

So when I first read the TMZ item that Tareq had reported his wife kidnapped  I was immediately suspicious. The story surfaced just four days before their Oasis Winery court ordered bankruptcy auction, and I could easily imagine how difficult life had become in their house in Linden, Va. I instantly thought Michaele had finally had enough.

Michaele Salahi always thought living life on a beautiful Virginia vineyard would be better for her health and less stressful than living on the road with a rock band. I guess she’s changed her mind.

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

Disasters in US: An extreme and exhausting year

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

 

Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes.

Unprecedented triple-digit heat and devastating drought. Deadly tornadoes leveling towns. Massive rivers overflowing. A billion-dollar blizzard. And now, unusual hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont.

If what's falling from the sky isn't enough, the ground shook in places that normally seem stable: Colorado and the entire East Coast. On Friday, a strong quake triggered brief tsunami warnings in Alaska. Arizona and New Mexico have broken records for wildfires.

Total weather losses top $35 billion, and that's not counting Hurricane Irene, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. There have been more than 700 U.S. disaster and weather deaths, most from the tornado outbreaks this spring.

Last year, the world seemed to go wild with natural disasters in the deadliest year in a generation. But 2010 was bad globally, and the United States mostly was spared.

This year, while there have been devastating events elsewhere, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Australia's flooding and a drought in Africa, it's our turn to get smacked. Repeatedly.

"I'm hoping for a break. I'm tired of working this hard. This is ridiculous," said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who runs Weather Underground, a meteorology service that tracks strange and extreme weather. "I'm not used to seeing all these extremes all at once in one year."

The U.S. has had a record 10 weather catastrophes costing more than a billion dollars: five separate tornado outbreaks, two different major river floods in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River, drought in the Southwest and a blizzard that crippled the Midwest and Northeast, and Irene.

What's happening, say experts, is mostly random chance or bad luck. But there is something more to it, many of them say. Man-made global warming is increasing the odds of getting a bad roll of the dice.

Sometimes the luck seemed downright freakish.

The East Coast got a double-whammy in one week with a magnitude 5.8 earthquake followed by a drenching from Irene. If one place felt more besieged than others, it was tiny Mineral, Va., the epicenter of the quake, where Louisa County Fire Lt. Floyd Richard stared at the darkening sky before Irene and said, "What did WE do to Mother Nature to come through here like this."

There are still four months to go, including September, the busiest month of the hurricane season. The Gulf Coast expected a soaking this weekend from Tropical Storm Lee and forecasters were watching Hurricane Katia slogging west in the Atlantic.

The insurance company Munich Re calculated that in the first six months of the year there have been 98 natural disasters in the United States, about double the average of the 1990s.

Even before Irene, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was on pace to obliterate the record for declared disasters issued by state, reflecting both the geographic breadth and frequency of America's problem-plagued year.

"If you weren't in a drought, you were drowning is what it came down to," Masters said.

Add to that, oppressive and unrelenting heat. Tens of thousands of daily weather records have been broken or tied and nearly 1,000 all-time records set, with most of them heat or rain related:

_ Oklahoma set a record for hottest month ever in any state with July.

_ Washington D.C. set all-time heat records at the National Arboretum on July 23 with 105 and then broke it a week later with 106.

_ Houston had a record string of 24 days in August with the thermometer over 100 degrees.

_ Newark, N.J., set a record with 108 degrees, topping the old mark by 3 degrees.

Tornadoes this year hit medium-sized cities such as Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. The outbreaks affected 21 states, including unusual deadly twisters in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

"I think this year has really been extraordinary in terms of natural catastrophes," said Andreas Schrast, head of catastrophic perils for Swiss Re, another big insurer.

One of the most noticeable and troubling weather extremes was the record-high nighttime temperatures, said Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. That shows that the country wasn't cooling off at all at night, which both the human body and crops need.

"These events are abnormal," Karl said. "But it's part of an ongoing trend we've seen since 1980."

Individual weather disasters so far can't be directly attributed to global warming, but it is a factor in the magnitude and the string of many of the extremes, Karl and other climate scientists say.

While the hurricanes and tornado outbreaks don't seem to have any clear climate change connection, the heat wave and drought do, said NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt.

This year, there's been a Pacific Ocean climate phenomenon that changes weather patterns worldwide known as La Nina, the flip side to El Nino. La Ninas normally trigger certain extremes such as flooding in Australia and drought in Texas. But global warming has taken those events and amplified them from bad to record levels, said climate scientist Jerry Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Judith Curry of Georgia Tech disagreed, saying that while humans are changing the climate, these extremes have happened before, pointing to the 1950s.

"Sometimes it seems as if we have weather amnesia," she said.

Another factor is that people are building bigger homes and living in more vulnerable places such as coastal regions, said Swiss Re's Schrast. Worldwide insured losses from disasters in the first three months this year are more than any entire year on record except for 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck, Schrast said.

Unlike last year, when many of the disasters were in poor countries such as Haiti and Pakistan, this year's catastrophes have struck richer areas, including Australia, Japan and the United States.

The problem is so big that insurers, emergency managers, public officials and academics from around the world are gathering Wednesday in Washington for a special three-day National Academy of Sciences summit to figure out how to better understand and manage extreme events.

The idea is that these events keep happening, and with global warming they should occur more often, so society has to learn to adapt, said former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, NOAA's deputy chief.

Sullivan, a scientist, said launching into space gave her a unique perspective on Earth's "extraordinary scale and power and both extraordinary elegance and finesse."

"We are part of it. We do affect it," Sullivan said. "But it surely affects us on a daily basis — sometimes with very powerful punches."___