After more than $5 billion and almost a decade of construction, the long-delayed Panama expansion opened amid cheering crowds on Sunday.

At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, the first official voyage through the newly expanded waterway was completed by a Chinese ship bearing 9,472 containers and named Cosco Shipping Panama. The mammoth set sail from the Greek port of Piraeus and two weeks later entered one of the new locks, on its way to the man-made Gatun Lake and the Pacific Ocean.

The expansion project is planned to modernize the 102-year-old waterway across the Isthmus of Panama that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Opening in 1914, the 50-mile-long passage created an important shortcut for ships and became a landmark of human ambition, determination and engineering progress. More than 25,000 workers, who labored to dig the canal through the jungles of Panama, died due to disease or accidents.

The new lane is expected to nearly triple the capacity of the original canal, allowing larger vessels carrying up to 14,000 containers to travel more quickly from U.S. ports to Asia or western stretches of South America.

The expansion project started in 2007 and includes a third set of locks to raise and lower vessels between the varying heights of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The locks use about 50 million gallons of water to move each ship through.

The expansion will allow ships carrying three times as many containers to pass. The Panama Canal Authority has another $17 billion plan to build a fourth set of locks to handle even bigger ships that can currently only pass through the Suez Canal.

The project is expected to bring in more than $2 billion per year in added revenue which represents 2,8 per cent of gross domestic product. More than 160 ships have signed up to use the expanded waterway in the next three months.

Ports in New York, Miami and New Jersey invested in their own expanded projects to deepen their harbors and draw bigger ships.