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Panama Canal Hires Harrison Ford to Fight Northern Passage
By The Boss on Feb 12, 2008 | In Canal | 1 feedback »
Ford, here working on the giant refrigerator.
The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) has hired award winning actor Harrison Ford to fight the threat of the Northern passage opening up much sooner than expected, Bananama Republic has learned.
The idea reportedly came to Canal administrator Alberto Aleman Zubieta after he had rented "The Mosquito Coast" at his local Blockbuster video outlet.
In that movie, Ford and family move to a tropical country where he starts producing giant ice cubes for refrigeration purposes.
"It was a stroke of genius on my part to come up with this solution," Aleman Zubieta said during a jam-packed press conference yesterday. "I saw Ford producing these ice blocks and thought: 'that's it!"
According to a distributed press release, the ACP will spend an unspecified amount - but believed to be well into the hundreds of millions of dollars - to send Ford to the North pole and produce ice. This, believes the ACP, will offset the melting of the Arctic icecap and thus prevent the Northern passage from opening up.
"It will be expensive, and it's unforeseen, but better spend the money now than watch the expanded Canal become obsolete," explained Aleman Zubieta, who has been struggling with several setbacks in the Canal expansion project. The competition of the Northern Passage comes on top of unforeseen inflation, a weak dollar, a shipping world unhappy to pay for a bigger ditch and worldwide economic slowdown.
Aleman Zubieta does not deny that he knew these factors would be working against the expansion. "But we couldn't tell anyone because then the proposal would never have passed the referendum, and this was just a once in a lifetime opportunity for me and my family," the Canal administrator explained.
Meanwhile, the ACP has been doing tests at its research facility near the Pedro Miguel locks and, supervised by Harrison Ford, produced hundreds of ice blocks that were then dumped in the water.
"We managed to reduce the water temperature in the Miraflores Lake with about 10 degrees," Aleman Zubieta said proudly. "That a passenger vessel ran into one of our artificial icebergs and sank was unfortunate, but showed us how effective our strategy will be on the North Pole. We see it as proof of concept."
The first Ford-led team will arrive on the pole in April, to try offset higher water temperatures as spring starts.
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