Panama Canal plans 29.5 ships a day from October as El Niño empties Gatun
A draft budget sent to Panama’s parliament would cut daily transits 18 percent from the August level of 36. Officials already reduced the cap to 32 on 4 September. The canal moves about 5 percent of world seaborne trade and about 40 percent of US container traffic.
Panama City3 min read
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The Panama Canal Authority has told parliament it plans to allow an average of 29.5 vessels a day from October, down from 36 in August and from the 32-ship cap that took effect on 4 September. The draft budget figure is an 18 percent cut from the August pace. Canal Affairs Minister José Ramón Ycaza said the spending plan is meant to keep the waterway safe, continuous, efficient and profitable while the watershed stays dry.
Administrator Ricaurte Vásquez’s successor, who took the post this month, had already warned that September, October and November rainfall will decide whether further cuts come in January, February or March. An earlier AFP account named the new administrator as Espino. The authority cut the daily maximum from 36 to 34 at the start of September, then to 32 from 15 September under the first drought plan. The October average of 29.5 would be the tightest slot count of this El Niño so far. It would still sit above the 22-ship floor of the 2023-24 drought.
The 82-kilometre canal lifts ships 26 metres from sea level into Gatun Lake and lowers them again through locks that each fill with fresh water. That water comes from the Gatun and Alhajuela reservoirs, which are fed by rain on the canal watershed. The authority said rainfall in the basin from May to August ran 34 percent below the historical average. Panama has declared a national emergency over El Niño. Officials describe this year’s event as among the strongest since modern records began about four decades ago. Honduras has already put 80 percent of its territory on drought alert.
The waterway handles about 5 percent of global maritime trade and about 40 percent of US container traffic. Shippers use it because it shortens the haul between Asia and the US East Coast. The war around Iran and the disruption in Hormuz have already raised insurance and routing costs. A second squeeze at Panama now hits the same cargoes from the other side of the map. Draft limits add another constraint. From 1 October the authority plans to cut allowable draft to 14.48 metres, which forces some larger ships to lighten loads or skip the transit.
Each lockage spends millions of litres of fresh water that then runs to the sea. When Gatun falls, the authority has two levers: fewer slots and shallower drafts. Both raise waiting times and the price of a booking. Auctioned transit slots already move with scarcity. A further drop to 29.5 ships a day means more cargo will wait at either ocean or divert around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, adding fuel burn and days.
The 2023-24 drought is the local memory. Crossings fell as low as 22 a day. Queues stretched for a week or more. Some grain and container lines paid premium prices for reserved slots. Others rerouted. The authority says it does not expect this cycle to reach that floor if the next three months bring even a modest recovery in rain. The draft budget, however, is written for a dry year. Parliament’s approval of that plan is the political act that turns a weather warning into a published capacity number.
Ycaza’s brief is to keep the canal earning while it uses less water. That tension will show up in two ledgers: the authority’s surplus, which funds a large share of Panama’s public budget, and the freight rates paid by shippers who can no longer treat the isthmus as a 36-ship utility. The number to watch after October is not only 29.5. It is the level of Gatun itself, because that lake, not the parliament paper, sets how many lockages the canal can actually run.
