SS Canberra – Panama Canal during the 1970s Part One – Digitised Cine Film

#SSCanberra #PanamaCanal #DigitisedCineFilm #nostalgia #shipspotting

SS Canberra – Panama Canal during the 1970s Part One – Digitised Cine Film

This video was originally a Standard 8mm Cine Film digitised using a Winait Film Scanner.

The film shows (in two parts) SS Canberra going through the Panama Canal. Several other ships are seen including Act 6 – Container Ship; Mundogas ??, LPG tanker; Olympic Destiny – Oil Tanker; USS Fletcher (DD-992);

Although it isn’t known when the film was taken it could have been in the late 1970s because the USS Fletcher wasn’t launched until 16 June 1979.

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Panama Canal

The Panama Canal is an artificial 82 km waterway in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean, cutting across the Isthmus of Panama, and is a conduit for maritime trade. Canal locks at each end lift ships up to Gatun Lake, an artificial freshwater lake 26 meters above sea level, created by damming up the Chagres River and Lake Alajuela to reduce the amount of excavation work required for the canal, and then lower the ships at the other end. An average of 200,000,000 L of fresh water are used in a single passing of a ship.

The Panama Canal shortcut greatly reduces the time for ships to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, enabling them to avoid the lengthy, hazardous Cape Horn route around the southernmost tip of South America via the Drake Passage or Strait of Magellan. It is one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken.

Colombia, France, and later the United States controlled the territory surrounding the canal during construction. France began work on the canal in 1881, but stopped because of lack of investors’ confidence due to engineering problems and a high worker mortality rate. The United States took over the project in 1904 and opened the canal in 1914. The US continued to control the canal and surrounding Panama Canal Zone until the Torrijos–Carter Treaties provided for its handover to Panama in 1977. After a period of joint American–Panamanian control, the canal was taken over by the Panamanian government in 1999. It is now managed and operated by the government-owned Panama Canal Authority.

The original locks are 33.5 meters wide. A third, wider lane of locks was constructed between September 2007 and May 2016. The expanded waterway began commercial operation on June 26, 2016. The new locks allow transit of larger, NeoPanamax ships.

Annual traffic has risen from about 1,000 ships in 1914, when the canal opened, to 14,702 vessels in 2008, for a total of 333.7 million Panama Canal/Universal Measurement System (PC/UMS) tons. By 2012, more than 815,000 vessels had passed through the canal. In 2017, it took ships an average of 11.38 hours to pass between the canal’s two outer locks. The American Society of Civil Engineers has ranked the Panama Canal one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. The canal is threatened by low water levels during drought and due to climate change.