DHS unveils plan for protecting trade after terrorist attack on ports

DHS secretary Michael Chertoff during a visit to the Los Angeles-Long Beach port on Friday unveiled a new strategy for the rapid resumption of trade after a terrorist attack at a major U.S. port. Chertoff said the plan was “about making sure we spend as little time as possible paralyzed by an attack.” The 130-page DHS’s new Strategy to Enhance International Supply Chain Security provides protocols for damage assessments of international supply lines. It also describes what kind of cargo and vessels should receive top priority based on public health, national security and economic needs. The plan’s goal is to streamline the complex jurisdictional path through which commerce moves, devise a chain of command, and return into service key terminals, bridges, roads, rail lines, and pipelines. The aim is quickly to restore the flow of commodities and goods, such as crude oil, clothing, car parts, and medical supplies if a terrorist attack were to occur at a major port.

The Los Angeles Times’s Louis Sahagun writes that even a brief closure of the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, the nation’s busiest, would result in economic losses running into billions of dollars, federal officials said. For example, the 11-day West Coast port lockout in 2002 cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1 billion a day and required roughly six months for full recovery. Because the United States represents nearly 20 percent of global maritime trade, a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack would affect economic activity around the world.

Ynder DHS’s new recovery strategy, a U.S. response to a terrorist incident would not trigger an automatic shutdown of all of the nation’s ports. The plan instead calls for a measured response, keeping some ports open based on available intelligence and specifics of an incident. Of all incidents, Chertoff said that countering the threat of nuclear terrorism was a priority. A nuclear explosion at the Port of Long Beach would immediately kill an estimated 60,000 people, expose 150,000 more to hazardous radiation, and cause 10 times the economic loss resulting from the terrorist attacks of 9/11, according to a report prepared a year ago by Rand Corporation. A more probable threat, security experts said, would be detonation of a dirty bomb, a crude nuclear weapon designed to disperse radioactive debris over a relatively localized area.

Detlof von Winterfeldt, director of the USC Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism, a research center funded by DHS, said that “Our research suggests a dirty bomb could create cancer in tens or hundreds of people. But the economic impacts of the radioactive contamination could be devastating.” It would take weeks, perhaps months, to clean up a dirty-bomb site so port workers could begin working again, he said. One challenge facing authorities is the volume of material coursing through the ports. Roughly only 4 percent of the more than 14 million cargo containers that move through the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex annually are inspected. By the end of this year, 100 percent of all the containers arriving in the nation’s seaports will be scanned for radiological and nuclear threats, Chertoff said. In the meantime, seaports are relying on year-old monitors that can detect the presence of radiation in containers passing nearby.

Currently, more than 85 stationary radiation monitors are positioned at marine terminals across the Los Angeles-Long Beach ports, with 24 more such devices attached to trucks, said Aileen Suliveras, assistant port director for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The new detection device, which scans containers as they are hauled out of marine terminals on trucks, is being tested at SSA Terminal on Pier A. If the new device is successful, authorities hope to have them at seaports and land border crossings across the nation in coming months as funding becomes available.

Later in the day, more than 500 people gathered at USC’s Bing Theatre to hear Chertoff speak about “security in the 21st century,” and the potential economic effects of a catastrophe at the port complex, which generates an estimated $295 billion a year. “Cleary, if terrorists want to devastate our economy, then from a cost/benefit perspective, one way of doing that is to launch devastating attacks on those essential vehicles for commerce and trade,” Chertoff said.