Chairman and managing director of the Suez Canal Authority, Osama Rabie, witnesses the commencement of the dredging works at the site of the canal duplication project taking place at km 122 at the Small Bitter Lakes by the authority's dredgers within the development project of the Southern entrance of the waterway.
This comes as an execution for the presidential directives of President Abdelfatah Elsisi to immediately start the proposed development project as well as setting a schedule to complete it as soon as possible.
His excellency, Osama Rabie, has asserted that the proposed development project is considered as a complement to waterway development efforts that began with the inauguration of the New Suez Canal. His excellency highlighted that the project will go through multiple phases as the first phase shall compromise the completion of the Canal Duplication Project at the Small Bitter Lakes area asserting the importance of the duplication project in process in maximizing the Canal's efficiency and shortening the vessels' transit time as well as raising the navigation safety factor in the southern sector by increasing the duplication areas in that sector by 25% of the 40 km distance where there is no duplication existent in the southern sector of the Suez Canal waterway.
It is worth mentioning that the waterway development project targets duplicating the area from km 122 to km 132 a 10-kilometer length to be added to the New Suez Canal to become 82 kilometers instead of 72 kilometers, in addition to widening and deepening the southern sector of the Suez Canal starting from km 132 till km 162.