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Monday 5 April 2010

Expansion of Panama Canal to Create 7,000 Jobs

The consortium awarded the largest and most important contract under a Panama Canal expansion plan announced it will hire 7,000 people over the next three years to build a new set of locks for the waterway. The managing director of Grupo Unidos por el Canal, Antonio Zaffaroni, told a press conference that the workers will be recruited through nationwide job fairs to be held in April and May. The hiring plan of the consortium led by Spain’s Sacyr Vallehermoso “reflects the intensity of the work required and therefore the goal of this fair is to recruit professionals in different sectors,” Zaffaroni said. The executive said the company will “necessarily” have to launch the project with experienced people, perhaps from other countries, though he added that those individuals will be responsible for training the local personnel that will replace them as the project advances. In the initial hiring stage, the job vacancies will include more than a dozen specialties ranging from masonry to civil and industrial engineering. But the executive added that a meeting with representatives of different local universities has been scheduled with a view to recruiting a different type of workforce.

Regarding the construction project, awarded to GUPC last July by the Panama Canal Authority, Zaffaroni said the consortium was currently in the earth-moving phase and that the lion’s share of the work would be carried out beginning in 2011. “The largest amount of work and therefore the largest amount of people (required) will be in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and then at the beginning of 2014 there will be another change in specialization, so that there will be fewer – but much more highly qualified – personnel,” he said. Other members of the GUPC consortium, which won the contract with a submitted base price of $3.12 billion, include Italy’s Impreglio, Belgium’s Jan de Nul and Panama’s Constructora Urbana.

The goal of the canal expansion plan, which encompasses several projects and is estimated to cost a total of $5.25 billion, is to double the waterway’s annual capacity from 300 million tons to 600 million tons. 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.

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