Man finds port security hitch
Jul 27, 2006 3:30 PM
Want to get into a secure port area? Just hitch a ride.
That's what The Seattle Times found when a staff reporter bummed rides with truck drivers he had never met to enter shipping terminals in Seattle and Los Angeles-Long Beach, according to an article published this week.
In a first-person account, Alwyn Scott wrote that only once was he asked for identification, at Terminal 18, the largest container dock in Seattle, and a uniformed guard waved him through the gate after he flashed an expired driver's license.
Port of Los Angeles Police Chief Ronald Boyd conceded to The Times that there are few measures to keep out stowaways in trucks, or even a container packed with dynamite.
"From the land side, everything pretty much moves freely and unobstructed," Boyd says.
In one effort to improve security, a new federal driver identification system is planned over the next two years. To date, though, port security efforts have been focused more on goods and ships entering the United States by sea than on trucks carrying goods and empty shipping containers to and from the docks, officials tell The Associated Press.
In congressional testimony last year, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Craig Bone said, "we must know and trust those who are provided unescorted access to our port facilities and vessels."
The Times reported that port guards fail to check a truck's "condo," a sleeping area behind the cab that could accommodate half a dozen men with equipment.
Scott wrote that on one sunny Saturday in Southern California, he readily got a ride from an immigrant driver with a blue Freightliner at a filling station near the Pacific Container Terminal at Long Beach, part of the nation's largest port complex.
"I hid in the 'condo,' behind a curtain. But I didn't need to," he wrote. "No guard was visible on duty.
Once inside, they had unescorted access to a 256-acre complex of stacked containers, cranes and trucks with cargo ships tied up at the side of the terminal.
Leaving the terminal, Scott wrote, the truck passed through a radiation monitor designed to check for material that could be used to make a so-called "dirty" bomb using conventional explosives to spread radioactive material over a wide area.
Port officials in both cities, informed of the reporter's experience, said they would see what could be done to keep out unauthorized persons.
"This terminal should have had much better security," said Art Wong, a spokesman for the Port of Long Beach. "This is something that we're going to have to take a look at."
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