Covering the Waterfront

Two days before his retirement ceremony July 30, Coast Guard Capt. Kevin Dale is a harried man.

His crowded, paper-strewn office at Coast Guard headquarters near the Washington Navy Yard on the Potomac River does not reflect the actions of a man on the verge of moving on. Instead, the departing chief of the Coast Guard's Office of Port and Vessel Security personifies a state of unfinished business. That's only fitting, since Dale has spent the past two years constructing the regulatory framework for a job that will continue for decades, if not longer.

The 2002 Maritime Transportation Security Act, which requires U.S. ports and vessels to develop broad security plans, and the concurrently developed International Ship and Port Facility Security Code, which imposes security standards on ports and vessels involved in global trade, both went into effect July 1. Together they represent the most comprehensive security standards governing the operations of seaports and ships in the history of maritime commerce. The new standards are meant to impose a level of order on a sector of the global economy notoriously resistant to government oversight.

"The whole system is built for speed and efficiency," says Dale. "Any time you introduce security measures, you slow that system down. There's a certain resistance to any change, and we are requesting huge changes in the way the maritime community operates."

The Coast Guard, as the lead agency for maritime security for the world's top sea-trading nation, spearheaded the international effort to develop globally accepted standards and was charged with implementing MTSA regulations in the United States. The law requires thousands of players, from small marina operators to multinational conglomerates, to develop and implement security plans. The Coast Guard must approve all plans. The law also requires the eventual development of identification cards for port workers and improved monitoring of ships and cargo.

The maritime security law demands that the Coast Guard exercise regulatory oversight far beyond anything it has ever done in the past. To make an enormously complex job even more difficult, the Coast Guard moved from the Transportation Department into the Homeland Security Department during the course of developing and implementing the port and vessel security regulations, which meant bringing an entirely new team of managers up to speed on a fast-moving program.

To expedite the process of drafting and implementing the regulations, the Coast Guard brought in people from other agencies, including Transportation, Defense, and the Office of Management and Budget, as well as representatives of agencies within Homeland Security, such as the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection and the Transportation Security Administration, to incorporate their concerns as the regulations developed. It proved an effective, if at times unwieldy, process, Dale says.

And by law, it had to be completed in one year. By comparison, the agency had had several years to implement the far less ambitious 1990 Oil Pollution Act, which aimed to tighten environmental restrictions on oil tankers after the Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska in 1989. Until MTSA was enacted, the Oil Pollution Act was the Coast Guard's most ambitious regulatory endeavor.

To ease the agency's burden, Congress waived requirements that the Coast Guard seek public input in formulating the new security regulations. Nonetheless, Coast Guard leaders feared that a difficult job would become impossible if they didn't involve people with a stake in implementing MTSA. So they launched an aggressive outreach plan to include industry and the public. The agency held seven all-day, heavily attended public meetings nationwide last year, which generated thousands of comments that Coast Guard officials took into consideration when developing the final regulations.

"Flexible Consistency"

It would be hard to find a slice of the economy more diverse than maritime trade. More than 95 percent of the imported goods Americans buy arrive in this country on ships. From gasoline to coffee and clothing, most of what you'll find in your local shopping center or mall is a product of maritime commerce, the bulk of it arriving on the 8,000 foreign-flagged vessels that make 50,000 port calls a year. Now the Coast Guard must ensure that all these vessels-except for fishing boats, small motorboats and most pleasure craft, which are generally not covered by MTSA-are held to more rigorous security standards. And that's the easy part.

Coast Guard officials have an expression they use when talking about the 361 ports that serve the United States: If you've seen one port, you've seen one port. Everything from caviar to crude oil, from cruise ships and pleasure yachts to tankers and container ships, comes in through ports. They encompass factories, railheads, major highways and, in some cases, airports. They are as diverse as the commodities that transit their waters. The Port of Houston is dotted with miles of refineries, while the combined ports of Los Angeles-Long Beach, the third-largest port complex in the world, receive 45 percent of the goods arriving in this country by container ship. It would be impossible-and foolish-to develop one-size-fits-all regulations for improving security at ports.

"We got a lot of strong feedback that we needed to be flexible about how ports meet new security mandates, and that we have to be consistent in how we apply [these rules]," says Dale. The Coast Guard achieved this policy of "flexible consistency" by generating performance-based goals, rather than prescriptive requirements, and then centrally reviewing port and vessel security plans developed by owners and operators to ensure all were evaluated based on the same criteria. For example, rather than telling port operators that they must install specific types of fencing, use security cameras and post a precise number of guards, the Coast Guard instead is requiring ports to control access to their facilities. It's up to the port authorities to figure out how to do that effectively. It's then up to the Coast Guard to ensure that the plans the ports develop comply with MTSA requirements, and that the ports and vessel operators implement them in a timely manner.

In many cases, owners and operators are developing plans using standards and templates established by trade associations and approved by the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard will certify these procedures over the next several months. About 6,400 owners and operators, however, crafted their own plans, which Coast Guard security contractors reviewed. A Government Accountability Office study, "Maritime Security: Substantial Work Remains to Translate New Planning Requirements Into Effective Port Security" (GAO-04-838), released in June, showed that contractors required revisions to all independent plans-and the Coast Guard concurred.

"It's very difficult to know how good is good enough," says Dale. "We bought ourselves a problem on the other end," he adds, referring to the need to certify compliance with the performance-based regulations over the next several months. The Coast Guard intends to conduct on-site compliance inspections of all facilities by January 2005 and all vessels by July 2005. It will be a daunting task, one that GAO auditors are concerned about.

The GAO report concluded that the enormity of the task could overwhelm the Coast Guard: "Inspectors will have to make decisions about whether owners and operators have identified all vulnerabilities and adequately addressed them. These decisions are complicated, in part because owners and operators have considerable choice in how to mitigate vulnerabilities, and because the Coast Guard will be seeing many of these plans for the first time.

"Other challenges include ensuring that enough inspectors are available, training them adequately and equipping them with useful guidance for making on-site inspection decisions. In short, these challenges are formidable because the Coast Guard expects to handle the added July-to-December inspection load mainly by using reservists with widely varying degrees of training and experience." In the longer term, the Coast Guard will have to ensure that owners and operators continue implementing their plans.

Pulling Out the Rabbit

From its inception, MTSA has posed an enormous burden for the Coast Guard. "We had to build a staff in record speed." says Cmdr. Suzanne Englebert, who recently became the commanding officer in the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office in St. Louis. Englebert orchestrated much of the nuts-and-bolts work necessary for meeting the July 1 deadline, working out of what staff called the "boiler room" at Coast Guard headquarters. Because the Coast Guard did not receive funding for new hires, the agency shifted personnel from other areas and in some cases brought on reservists to help.

A staff of about 100 people worked 14- to 16-hour days, on average, seven days a week, with employees rotating Saturday and Sunday duties. Englebert describes the experience as "invigorating." She says, "This was the first real regulatory [effort] DHS had to do-we had to get it done on time."

The agency received 2,100 questions from port and vessel owners and operators in the course of crafting the regulations, says Capt. Mike Rand, who was responsible for implementing vessel and facility security plans. There were a number of questions about creating security plans for hazardous cargo.

Not all such cargo is equally dangerous. For example, drilling mud-a byproduct of oil production-is classified as a hazardous material because it contains pollutants. But it wouldn't make a good terrorist weapon and therefore shouldn't require the same sort of safeguards as ammonium nitrate, the highly combustible fertilizer Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Rand, now based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as an officer in the Coast Guard's European Command, says the ongoing challenge will be to continually refine and improve the security plans.

Englebert agrees. "I don't want you to think we did this without trauma," she says. "Nor do I want you to think we did it perfectly. What we succeeded in doing was putting the framework for port security in place in one year." Dale worries that the Coast Guard has created another expectation. "We kind of pulled the rabbit out of the hat here," he says.

Coast Guard captains of the port-the officials in charge of compliance at ports nationwide-may have to continue to pull rabbits out of their hats to enforce the new security requirements. Capt. Mary Landry, captain of the Port of Providence, R.I., says "This has been a very compressed time frame. The industry was reading the new regulations at the same time we were reading them." She and her staff held workshops throughout the Providence region to make sure all port officials and vessel owners knew what to expect. "You just hope you don't miss anybody," she says.

While the larger ports and vessels that make frequent calls tended to at least be aware that changes were coming, that wasn't the case for some small ports. One port in Landry's jurisdiction, for example, receives one shipment a year-a barge carrying fireworks for Fourth of July celebrations. It is critical that those officials understand the latest regulations, she says.

Among other things, Landry's staff is boarding many more vessels to review security plans. "It's not just MTSA; you have the parallel international code," she says. She's in constant touch with colleagues at other ports to be sure Providence is interpreting and enforcing requirements consistently. She also brought on three Coast Guard reservists to augment her Marine Safety Office staff of 39.

Officials at the ports of Los Angeles-Long Beach had a leg up, says Capt. Peter Neffenger. In June 2001, in response to warnings of terrorist attacks in the final report of the bipartisan Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, chaired by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, federal, state and local law enforcement officials at the port took steps to improve security. Before Sept. 11, the Coast Guard had begun cataloging critical infrastructure at the port, such as bridges, rail lines and oil facilities, and developing voluntary security standards.

Since the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex is a critical part of the global trade system, it frequently figures into worst-case scenarios imagined for future terrorist attacks. More than 14,000 containers a day are unloaded there. If the port complex were to close, there wouldn't be enough remaining capacity in the entire United States to redistribute the workload, says Neffenger. "There's a tremendous amount of infrastructure in a very small geographic area here," he says. "Everybody recognizes the vulnerability, and that drives tremendous cooperation."

A major continuing challenge to enhancing port security is the cost, says Neffenger. The Coast Guard estimates it will cost port officials and vessel operators, many of whom operate on small profit margins, more than $7 billion to comply with the new regulations over the next 10 years. To date, Congress has authorized $500 million in port security grants.

High Stakes

While federal officials believe MTSA is a major step forward in improving security at U.S. ports, nobody seems to consider it anything more than the first small step toward preventing terrorists from exploiting the weaknesses inherent in the still wide-open world of maritime trade. The new law doesn't cover small pleasure boats, for example, even though it was a small, explosive-laden watercraft that was used in the October 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. In addition, the 110,000 fishing vessels that regularly unload their perishable goods at U.S. ports fall outside MTSA regulations.

Michael Mitre, security director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, who lives and works at the ports of Los Angeles-Long Beach, says enormous security gaps remain at the ports: lax inspection of containers, both inbound and outbound; inadequate identification procedures of workers, especially truck drivers who arrive and depart from ports with little scrutiny, and the Coast Guard's insufficient capacity to enforce new regulations.

"The Coast Guard has never traditionally been an on-terminal enforcer of regulations," Mitre told a House panel in June. "You don't ever see teams of Coast Guard on the grounds. . . . It's a huge job. Having a young 19-year-old come on [to make inspections] is going to take an immense amount of training. Usually training comes in the form of osmosis. People that run these terminals, they've been working on them for five, 10 years before they really fully understand how unique terminal operation is."

Dale concedes that there is much work yet to be done: "People can sit down and conjure up dozens and dozens of threats. No one's going to deny they're there. What we've done is put in place some basic security measures. We'll be looking to see if they're effective."

Dale's Coast Guard career has been unusual in the sense that he has been involved in port security and anti-terrorism planning since the 1980s-long before the Sept. 11 hijackers moved terrorism to the top of the nation's agenda. Early in his career, a colleague advised him that focusing on security would be a professional mistake. If he wanted to move up the ranks in the Coast Guard, he was told, he should focus on environmental issues. Dale didn't care; security issues were of greater interest and concern to him.

On Sept. 11, Dale's only brother, Brian, was on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. "This is only a small piece of a very big problem. It's meant a lot to me to be able to do this," Dale says. "It's not for my brother-that's far too simple. This is a tremendous problem. The stakes are different, and they're very high."