Pilot testing initiated three years ago in several foreign ports to explore the feasibility of scanning all outbound cargo containers before they are loaded on ships destined for the U.S. has shown a range of challenges, an official that helps oversee the screening programs for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tells TR2.
“The lesson’s that we’ve learned, some of them have been very similar from country to country, some of them have been specific to certain countries,” Dan Stajcar, director of the Container Security Initiative (CSI) at CBP, says in a recent interview. Stajcar also oversees the Secure Freight Initiative (SFI), which was a pilot project begun in 2007 in the Bush administration at the behest of Congress to test how the U.S. could meet a congressional mandate that all seagoing containers be scanned with X-Ray and radiation detection machines before departing from a foreign port on a container ship bound for the U.S.
What were some of those lessons from the SFI program?
At the Korean port of Busan, Stajcar says the truckers’ union became very actively involved in SFI and that they had “grave concerns” about their drivers hauling containers through the X-Ray machines (in this case Science Applications International Corp.’s P7500 VACIS drive-through system) despite the fact that the machines come with a certification that they do not emit harmful radiation. That caused a delay in implementing the screening and “we were never able to get past that,” he said.
Ultimately at Busan, the SFI pilot was limited to a single lane at one terminal and participation by the truckers was voluntary, Stajcar says.
“So we never really got much cooperation or did a whole lot of scans to be honest because they would decide whether or not they went through the X-Ray or not,” he says.
The challenges of collaborating with host nations and organizations within those countries aren’t new. The Government Accountability Office in Jan. 2008 reported on reported on a number of hurdles CBP officials faced in examining cargo under the CSI program, including legal restrictions and logistical issues. Even language barriers are a problem, the agency has said.
Another oft-repeated challenge is the difficulty with scanning transshipped cargo, that is containers off-loaded from one vessel that are immediately loaded onto another ship or from a rail car onto a ship. For now the technology doesn’t exist to scan this cargo, Stajcar says.
“For us to do all of transshipped cargo you would have to ask the ports and the shippers to pull everything off of a ship, put it onto a chassis, drive it to wherever the machine would happen to be, go through it, then back to where they just came from,” he says. “It’s really difficult without hindering the operations of the port.”
This was a big issue at the port of Hong Kong, where the SFI pilot was in just one terminal.
The port of Southampton in the United Kingdom also handles transshipped cargo, which limited container scanning, Stajcar says. It also handles a lot of rail traffic, which didn’t get scanned, he says. Instead, the pilot was set up for scanning containers brought by trucks through the main gate, “which we did a very good job of the gate traffic,” Stajcar say.
Made for Gate Traffic
Conducting scanning operations at gates has proved to be quite doable.
“The 100 percent scanning methodology…worked very well with gate traffic, where everything comes through a single lane, road and gate into a port and then is distributed from there depending on where it’s going,” Stajcar says.
Although even scanning at gates can have its demands.
At Port Qasim in Pakistan, all the U.S.-bound container traffic runs through a gate and all of it is being screened by an X-Ray machine and a radiation portal monitor, Stajcar says. To do this the port was very involved in the design and set up of the scanning operations and gave up five acres of ground to so that 100 percent scanning could be achieved.
Qasim “is a very efficient operation,” Stajcar says. The port does handle relatively low volumes of U.S. bound cargo but the volume has picked up ever since SFI operations began, he says.
In Honduras, the SFI pilot was set up at the Port of Cortes. Stajcar says that political unrest, which shut down the roads to the port, hindered operations there early on. In addition, there were also difficulties with data transmission although this has improved, he says.
Unlike the other pilot sites, at Cortes the port owns the scanning equipment and fees are charged for the scans, Stajcar says.
CBP has wanted to conduct SFI operations at the Port of Salalah in Oman although for now it is operating like a CSI port in that CBP is targeting containers for scanning based on risk assessments, Stajcar says. More work is planned related to operations there, he says.
In February Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified before a House Homeland Security Committee panel that she would like to revisit the 100 percent container screening effort, which Congress mandated in 2006 as part of the SAFE Port Act. She said that the fact that additional data elements that shippers must send to CBP allow the agency to better identify high risk shipments. In addition, electronic records sharing and prior notice of arrival by ships destined for the U.S. are making it easier to do risk assessments of cargo, she said.
CBP and DHS have long believed that the most cost effective way to scan cargo is based on targeting high risk shipments.
As a result of the various SFI lessons and CBP’s ability to better identify high risk shipments, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pull back from the SFI program by converting the effort at three ports–Busan, Cortes and Southampton–to the CSI protocols. The CSI protocols being the targeted scanning of high risk cargo rather than attempting to scan all cargo. DHS outlined its plans in general in February with the release of its FY ’11 budget request.
Before the Port of Hong Kong participated in SFI it actually was participating with private industry in a 100 percent scanning demonstration at gate using X-Ray and radiation portal monitor systems. However, while containers were being scanned, the imagery and radiation data frequently wasn’t being reviewed because there were too many trucks passing through and not enough screening officials to look at the data.
Stajcar says that SFI took on that issue by including high volume ports, as well as low volume ports and ports handling a lot of transshipped cargo to figure out what would work and what wouldn’t. As time goes by, he expects that technology will improve so that some challenges that are too great now will eventually be addressed.