Building the Panama Canal

Building the Panama Canal Bigger & Better: Warehouses holding everything from beer kegs to frozen chickens crowd the roadside along Highway 146 south of Houston, and a ferocious building boom is adding acres more, thanks to an even bigger project 1,800 miles away in Panama.

Panama Canal

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A $5.25 billion plan to triple the Panama Canal's capacity finishes in 2014, opening the way to Houston for mega-sized cargo vessels that can't squeeze through the canal's current locks and don't want to steam around South America.

The prospect of bigger ships, and more of them, could be a boon for the Port of Houston, which already handles more foreign tonnage than any other U.S. port.

With an eye toward feeding the U.S. consumer's insatiable demand for Asian-made goods, U.S. retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Home Depot have built millions of square feet (hundreds of thousands of square meters) of warehouse space around Houston ports.

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