The Panama Canal is in Need of Expansion
It had started down a path towards becoming obsolete, primarily due to the increasing size of both dry bulk carriers and liquid bulk carriers. The first container ship that was too large to transit the Panama Canal was delivered in 1988, and nearly half of all container ships in service are too large to transit the canal now. This poses an obviously difficult question of what to do about fitting a 220,000 tonne peg in an 80,000 tonne hole. The most obvious way is to build a bigger hole and that means making the canal bigger. The original canal was built by governments in a time when labor was the most important component in the success of the canal. Today an engineering project this size is only achievable by the top engineering companies around the world working together to lend their specialized experience and internal organizational strengths to one of the largest public works project in the history of the world.