Port discussion moves beyond containers
Critics say inland ports are neglected in homeland security planning.
Focus on shipping containers as potential Trojan horses for a WMD attack on the United States could be diverting needed attention from other seaborne threats, lawmakers and witnesses said at a field hearing yesterday on the subject.
The United States has done a good job of addressing the shipping-container threat across the supply chain, but other potentially devastating scenarios - the sinking of a cruise vessel at a strategic location to paralyze river commerce, for example - have gone comparatively unnoticed, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Christopher Cox, R-Calif., told reporters by telephone after a hearing of the panel in Vicksburg, Miss.
"Everybody's talking about security for containers," Inland Rivers, Ports and Terminals Association Executive Director Deirdre McGowan said when interviewed separately by telephone after testifying at the hearing. "Of course, I was audacious enough to say that the Cole was not attacked by a container."
The U.S.S. Cole was attacked by an explosive-laden terrorist craft in October 2000 the port of Aden, Yemen.
McGowan said inland ports do not get the attention that ocean ports receive even though the former can be more vulnerable, since they tend to be longer. "They just don't have the visibility that the ocean ports do," she said.
About 4 percent of federal port security grant money goes for inland ports, McGowan said. She called for a renewed commitment to inland ports, including for use as test grounds for new technologies and new approaches to port security.
Cox and McGowan both stressed the importance of basing port security funding on risk. "All of our terrorism preparedness grants should be risk-based," Cox said.
Although McGowan acknowledged that high-profile threats such as radiological weapons are not as applicable to inland ports as ocean ports, she called for a greater focus on conventional weapons that could have a serious economic effect on river commerce.
She offered the example of the port of Pittsburgh - potentially vulnerable to a container carrying radiation, she said, "but how likely is that?"
"Is this really where we should put our resources?" she asked.