With a blast of fanfare loud enough to drown out a background buzz of deep scepticism, Nicaragua has declared that it is moving forward with plans to build a waterway linking the Pacific to the Caribbean. The finished project would compete with the Panama Canal, which itself is undergoing a grand expansionç SİA reports quoting The İndependent.
Billed as the biggest engineering project in human history, the new canal would stretch 173 miles: starting at the mouth of the river Brito on the Pacific side, bisecting Lake Nicaragua near the border with Costa Rica and heading eastwards via the Tule and Punta Gordas rivers as far as Bluefields Bay on the Caribbean.
With a $40 billion price tag, the project is the brainchild of President Daniel Ortega, the one-time Marxist guerrilla turned laissez-faire leader, who says it will lift his people out of poverty, and Wang Jing - described by the New Yorker magazine as "an obscure Chinese tycoon" - who is a lawyer, not an engineer.
A special canal committee created by Mr Ortega said on Monday that it had settled on the route for the canal after considering six different options. Members said they expected ground to be broken this December with a highly ambitious 2019 completion date. (It took 10 years to build the existing Panama Canal, which is one third of the length of the Nicaraguan route).
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