ENLARGING PANAMA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 17, 21 January 1939, Page 8

ENLARGING PANAMA.

MILITARY REQUIREMENTS. According to Colonel C. S. Ridley, Governor of tlie Panama Canal Zone, .VJB7 commercial vessels carrying 28,058,109 tons passed through tlie locks in the fiscal year 1938. The actual capacity of the canal is 70,000,000 ton* annually, a capacity which will not be readied until 1970. Why, then, enlarge the canal, a 6 he proposes in hk annual report to the Secretary of War? Military necessity is his answer. Panama's locks are 1000 feet long and 110 feet wide. Aircraft carriers, with their 100foot. beams, can just scrape through; the Queen Mary and Xormandie, both over 1000 feet long and over 110 feet in beam, cannot pass at all. Evidently a case can be made for enlargement. The engineers who built the canal foresaw the. ultimate necessity for additional capacity, but thought their 1000-foot locks would be good for many a decade, if not for a century. Two methods of enlargement are possible. The one i« tlie transformation of the canal into a sea-level waterway in twenty-live vears at a cost of at least £200,000.000*; the other is the provision of a third set of locks in ten years at a cost of £30,000,000. If the first is adopted, America's total capital investment in Panama will come to £300,000,000— huge even at a time when she is spending £200,000.000 a year on national defence. Colonel Ridley is satisfied with a third set of locks, provided they can be built "at a much greater distance from the present locks than has heretofore been contemplated." Since the canal is only 50 miles long from ocean to ocean, no distance at all for a 200-milc-an-liour bomber, (he matter of location seems to be of no great moment. But defence is.