The Panama Canal Expansion

From Fortune:

The shipping industry has outgrown the nearly 100-year-old Panama Canal, so the canal is adding a third lane with wider, deeper, and longer locks. The eight-year, $5.25 billion project will add three 1,400-foot-long, 60-foot-deep chambers to each end of the 50-mile route connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans -- an increasingly vital (and lucrative) passage between Asia and the Eastern U.S.
By the numbers
73%: Growth in shipping from Asia to the East Coast of the U.S. from 2000 to 2011. During that time the Panama Canal's toll revenue grew 201%.
788 million: Amount of dirt, in cubic feet, excavated and dredged for the canal's Third Lane Expansion project -- enough to fill 671,943 standard shipping containers.
12,000: Container capacity of post-"Panamax" cargo ships, so called because they aren't yet able to pass through the canal (current maximum size is 5,000 containers).

That is a pretty cool project, but for what they are doing, 788 million cubic feet of dirt doesn't seem like an awful lot.  That's less than 30 million cubic yards.  To increase the size of ship traveling the Panama Canal by 140%, that doesn't seem too bad.