Secure Freight report heads to Congress

Secure Freight report heads to Congress The Secure Freight Initiative for conducting automated inspections of all U.S.-bound containers at a handful of foreign ports is conceptually working but experiencing problems with system reliability and difficulties checking vessel transshipment cargo.
   Those are the preliminary lessons that U.S. Customs and Border Protection plans to relay to congressional appropriators later this month, program director Rich DiNucci said Wednesday at the quarterly Commercial Operations Advisory Committee meeting held in Tucson, Ariz.
   The agency has completed its draft of the report, which is required by the SAFE Port Act, and is circulating it within the Department of Homeland Security for final approval.
   Congress mandated one-year trials at three foreign ports of systems capable of imaging the contents of containers and detecting whether they emit radiation to prevent weapons of mass destruction from being smuggled into the United States through commercial channels.
   The experimental effort to scan 100 percent of cargo containers is underway at Port Qasim near Karachi, Pakistan; Puerto Cortes in Honduras and Southampton, United Kingdom. The ports were selected because of their limited volumes in order to make the test process manageable. The tests were designed to study the feasibility of scanning all containers at truck gates, but Congress ordered in July that all containers destined for the United States undergo non-intrusive technical exams by 2012.
   The program office recently sent out an e-mail to some shippers that move cargo through the test ports seeking feedback on their container flows and velocity, and will accept unsolicited comments as well, DiNucci said.
   He noted that the pilot program has added two to three minutes to the container cycle time at the Port of Southampton. Harsh weather conditions in various locations have temporarily disabled some of the equipment, CBP has previously reported.
   But the information technology systems for electronically transmitting the radiation reads and images back to the National Targeting Center for security evaluation is working well so far, DiNucci said.
   The border agency is also testing the scan-all approach at four high-volume ports — Port Busan in South Korea; Salalah, Oman; Hong Kong; and Singapore — on a limited basis to observe how scanning works in different operating environments. Singapore, for example, is a major transshipment port and does not handle as much truck traffic compared to other ports.
   CBP will complete a much more extensive report on the Secure Freight pilot program and deliver it to Congress in April.
   One industry representative urged CBP to place the reports in context so that Congress doesn't get the impression that 100 percent scanning can work everywhere just because it worked on a controlled basis in a few low-volume situations. ' Eric Kulisch