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C-TPAT and Cargo Security: Sea Change

In an effort to prevent terrorists from turning container and cargo ships into weapons, Customs is counting on big business to goad partners into improving security through initiatives like C-TPAT.

What remains to be seen is whether Customs can strike the right balance between making the guidelines stringent enough to actually improve security and flexible enough so that companies won't balk at joining, even though participation means trying to wrap their arms around complex supply chains in a way they've never before contemplated. That when anything that might slow down commerce is viewed with skepticism, and when merely getting different divisions of your company to agree about the purpose of fences can be a struggle all its own.

"Clearly some countries think this is a U.S. problem and not their problem," Wheatley says. "It's a matter of sensitizing people to the fact that we're in a global economy, and what affects one partner is going to have a ripple effect back to other countries. [C-TPAT] is a massive undertaking and a bit of a sales job."

The truth is, the guidelines that Customs officials, and by extension C-TPAT members, are hawking are still very much on rough waters.Moving the Global EconomyEven as Wheatley speaks, 100 miles north of his office in San Diego, ships from all over the world are easing their way into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the largest port area in the United States and the third largest in the world. The ships are packed tight with the building blocks of the global economy: 20-foot-long and 40-foot-long containers full of TV sets, tennis shoes and tomatoes. Some 20,000 containers a day (45 percent of all loaded containers coming into the United States) make their way through these ports and on to the rest of the country by way of train and truck. If you wonder what that means for the nation's economy, just ask William Ellis, director of security for the Port of Long Beach.

"Two billion dollars a day," Ellis says, referring to the cost of a dockworkers strike at his port in late 2002, which brought cargo shipping there to a grinding halt. "In 10 days, we had a $20 billion impact on the U.S. economy. If all shipping was shut down, it would be devastating."

Yet that's precisely what many observers fear could happen if terrorists managed to sneak a dirty bomb, or even just the equivalent of a car bomb, into one of those containers and detonate it in the United States.

"After Sept. 11, we threw the globalization kill switch" by shutting down air transportation, says Stephen Flynn, a former U.S. Coast Guard commander who is widely recognized as the country's leading expert on cargo security. "My fear is that something happens on a truck or a train or a ship, and we throw that transportation kill switch again to sort things out; and we don't even start with the [security] baseline we had with aviation. The time it will take to restore public confidence will have an incredibly disruptive impact on the economy."