Why U.S. Seaports Aren't Safe
Where do the security of U.S. seaports and your supply chain intersect? What are the risks to your bottom line if your incoming product inventory is sitting on the docks of an insecure, easily targeted port? And just how easy would it be to send explosives and destructive weapons into a major port city in this country? These articles examine the local, federal and business vulnerabilities of American seaports. A major highlight of these articles is a four-month examination of the one of the busiest and largest ports in the United States: Oakland, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay area.

This Baseline case study offers a close look at the financial politics of seaport security management; the role of information sharing (or lack thereof) via communication technologies; attempts at making sense of Department of Homeland Security rhetoric; and the challenges of making businesses of all sizes comply with Customs regulations.

A thin plastic security strip is sometimes all that protects a ship against the introduction of illicit materials.

Every day, 1,500 containers arrive at the port of Oakland, California, ready to be moved swiftly onto the rails and highways that will take their contents into the heartland of america. While they are being unloaded, a terrorist in a rowboat can paddle in uncontested, set off a bomb and rock the heart of the harbor with an explosion. Meanwhile, U.S. Customs officials, who have to verify the contents of those 19-ton packages of goods, in the end have to trust that the captains of arriving ships are telling the simple truth about what's on board.

Ray Boyle still admires the rugged beauty of the Port of Oakland. The harbor is filled every day with all manner of sleek vessels—from 10-foot kayaks, to 30-foot sloops, to oceangoing cargo ships that stretch almost 1,000 feet from stem to stern.

The wake from the giant ships laps lazily against the docks, where 200-foot-high cranes perch like giant heron ready to pick containers off their massive decks. Near the foot of the lifts, the Northern California sun glints off a small fleet of diesel-powered 18-wheel trucks, waiting to receive their loads.

Oakland is a productive port. Its mission is to move commercial freight "quickly, at the best possible cost, to generate the best profit," as Boyle, the port's general manager of maritime operations, puts it. Last year, it handled more than 1.7 million cargo containers, trailing only the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Calif., and New York-New Jersey.

But security has never been part of its mission—or that of any port. The idea of slowing down cargo to check it for destructive contents, Boyle says, "is alien to a certain extent."

No longer does Boyle—a 30-year veteran of the Port of Oakland—regard a kayak as simply a recreational craft. He wonders whether suicide bombers might be rowing underneath the docks. He thinks about Al Qaeda operatives being smuggled aboard one of those giant cargo vessels. If that's not enough to turn his gray head of hair white, he contemplates the possibility that weapons of mass destruction could be hidden in one of the approximately 1,500 containers that get trucked out of the port each day.

This kind of exposure at seaports puts a foundation of the U.S. economy at risk.

Ninety-five percent of the $827 billion of trade done with countries outside of North America comes in by ship. That is 7.6% of the $10.4 trillion of goods and services consumed annually in the United States. In addition, the $104 billion worth of oil imported annually to power factories, retail stores, schools and vehicles of all sizes and shapes comes in by ship.

If something was to happen to Boyle's port, it would affect ports across the country. In the event of an attack, the federal government likely would order all the nation's 360 harbors shut down. The ripple effects of such a move were seen last fall, when a 10-day strike by dockworkers at Oakland and 28 other West Coast ports cost U.S. businesses $2 billion a day in lost sales, according to the American Association of Port Authorities.

Port managers are working feverishly to prevent a dockside doomsday. For his part, Boyle is assessing port vulnerabilities and tightening up perimeter defenses with motion-detector equipped fences and surveillance cameras. He's also looking at gate-control mechanisms that ultimately could include everything from smart cards to biometrics.

But Oakland needs to do a lot more—and Boyle knows it. He doesn't have the funds to set up an emergency communications network that would connect the 11 container terminals in his harbor with the Oakland Police Department. Nor does he have the money for a vessel that would patrol Oakland's 19 miles of waterfront. Those projects could run into the millions of dollars. Boyle says, "We don't have that much money."

Oakland made what it says was a fair and accurate assessment of its needs and applied for more than $150 million in federal port security grants to pay for fences, barricades, surveillance cameras and many other projects. So far, the port has received just $6.4 million—$4.8 million in a first round of aid and $1.6 million in a second.…

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3048,a=103240,00.asp