Word: panamas
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...elevators consumes a prodigious amount of fresh water. Each time a ship passes through the canal, some 52 million gallons must be pumped into the locks and then, after the ship has passed, flushed out to sea. "The locks are like giant water closets," explains an official of the Panama Canal Commission. "Once you pull the chain, you never see the water again...
...ships pass on their route across the isthmus. Most of the remainder is tapped from nearby Madden Lake, formed in 1935 (also by damming) to provide an additional reservoir of water for the dry season. But now a 375-page report by Stanley Heckadon Moreno, an environmentalist at Panama's Ministry of Planning, has raised a startling worry about the canal's future: it may be running short of water...
Once the trees are gone, denuded slopes are eroded by rainfall, which has been washing soil into 20-sq.-mi. Madden Lake at the rate of half a million tons a year. A study by Hydrologist Luis Alvarado of the Panama Canal Commission shows that silt accumulating at the bottom of the lake has reduced its storage capacity by 5%. By the year 2000 the loss could be as high as 10%, and by 2020 nearly...
...threat to the canal may be worsened by another consequence of deforestation. According to Donald Windsor of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the average annual rainfall in central Panama has decreased by as much as 10% since the turn of the century. "Because of deforestation," he says, "there is less evapotranspiration." And because less water rises into the air in vapor form, less returns in the form of rainfall...
Despite these dire projections, the Panama Canal Commission has reacted coolly. Says David Baerg, the group's environmental and energy-control officer: "We are not in a crisis situation, where things have to be changed immediately." Heckadon disagrees. He has called for the formation of a body like the Tennessee Valley Authority to take charge of the watershed and begin enforcing conservation of the remaining rain forest. "If we don't start acting now," he says, "in 15 years or so we might start having problems...