By Calvin Biesecker
Initial lessons from a nearly six-month old pilot program at several overseas seaports to test the feasibility of scanning 100 percent of all cargo bound for the United States include substantial costs and a slew of operational and personnel challenges to maintain the effort, a senior official with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said yesterday.
The Secure Freight Initiative has been fully operational at three ports since last October, and each of these locations is relatively small in terms of the amount of containers bound for the U.S. each year yet the cost is about $30 million to establish the scanning effort at each, Jayson Ahern, deputy commissioner at CBP, told the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee.
“Even though these were small locations that were manageable for meeting the requirements of the SAFE Port Act, when you then go ahead and put them out exponentially what it would be in a large meaningful port, those are significant issues,” Ahern testified.
The six-month pilot at Port Qasim, Pakistan, Southampton in the United Kingdom, and Puerto Cortes in Honduras, wraps up next week. Partial implementations of Secure Freight are underway at four additional ports. An interim assessment of the pilot project was delivered to Congress on Tuesday. The pilot projects are being done toward meeting a goal of 100 percent scanning of U.S. bound cargo at foreign ports under the SAFE Port Act.
The number of shipping containers bound for the United States from Qasim, Southampton and Cortes annually is 3,000, 30,000 and 60,000 respectively, which is very manageable when compared to Hong Kong, which sends 1.2 million shipping containers here each year, Ahern said.
The scanning systems set up at these ports include radiation portal monitors, which alert for the presence of radioactive material inside a cargo container, and X-Ray inspection systems, which allow operators to obtain an image of the contents of the container. Trucks entering the ports through gates can quickly pass through both portal systems. However, while the radiation systems work relatively quickly and automatically in terms of providing an alert, the X-Ray systems require a human operator to read the scan for any anomalies, a process that can take more or less time depending on the contents of a container.
The scanning systems are integrated and images are sent to the National Targeting Center in the United States 24 hours before a container leaves the terminal for interpretation by analysts. In addition to the costs of operating in the systems in the foreign ports, there is also the cost to send the data back to the United States, which in the case of the Secure Freight pilot at the Port of Salalah, Oman, runs into the millions of dollars annually, Ahern said. And again, he reminded the panel, that’s just for a relatively small number of containers so it’s going to be “a real issue” when it comes to expanding the scanning regime to other ports.
Other challenges facing Secure Freight moving forward include sustaining the scanning equipment when it breaks down, Ahern said. “What do you do in that particular environment when you’re facing a 24 hour departure requirement?” he said. Those sustainment issues go beyond routine operations and maintenance costs, he added. In some areas, such as Qasim, extreme weather conditions pose challenges to the equipment, he said.
Ahern also said that depending on a particular port, it may also be difficult to find the necessary real estate to be able to have an integrated radiation and X-Ray scanning system and the secondary inspection area that goes with that.
A critical component to getting the Secure Freight Initiative, and a similar effort known as the Container Security Initiative (CSI), up and running is having good partnerships with the host countries, Ahern said. At the Port of Southampton, which has a small and manageable footprint, it worked but “you don’t have that luxury elsewhere,” he said.
Regarding Southampton, Ahern indicated some containers bound for the United States aren’t being screened because they are going through a transshipment process. Transshipment refers to containers coming in on a vessel, and being offloaded, and then being loaded back onto another ship without having to pass through a terminal gate.
“It’s basically gate traffic that you have the opportunity to get,” Ahern said. “So transshipment is a huge problem as we go forward.”
Another problem plaguing CBP and even the host countries for CSI and Secure Freight is personnel staffing. Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, said that based on recent visits by himself and other panel members to Salalah and the Port of Alexandria in Egypt there is a “challenge” in meeting staffing requirements.
“We did have very enlightening, not necessarily totally encouraging visits to Alexandria and Salalah,” Price said. He said it’s obvious that CBP officials overseas need skill sets that are hard to come by. Price said he was surprised that CBP’s FY ’09 budget request is flat in terms of the numbers of staffers it needs for CSI.
Ahern said that staffing, both for CBP and getting the appropriate commitment from the host country, is “one of the many complexities of the overseas initiative.”
“As we move forward with 100 percent scanning that is going to be a huge undertaking, not only for us but for our host country partners that we cannot execute the program without,” Ahern said.