A Port Of Last Resort

I’ve been meaning to get to this for about the last two weeks, but William Finnegan, a reporter for The New Yorker, wrote an excellent article on the Port of New York and New Jersey in the magazine’s June 19th issue. It’s a very detailed and well-crafted look at the port’s operation and an interview with people well-versed in the port’s storied history. The main theme of the article, as you may expect, is how vulnerable the port is to terrorism, and Finnegan posed the question of how a ship could be used as a weapon.

“It could be a loaded oil tanker, intended to be used as a bomb, or to take down a bridge. Or maybe a bad guy plans to sink a ship in the middle of Kill Van Kull (the entrance to Newark Bay where the biggest container terminals reside). That would stop about eighty percent of our container traffic, “ according to Captain (Glenn) Wiltshire, U.S. Coast Guard and Captain of the Port of New York and New Jersey. “We’re also on the lookout for a U.S.S. Cole-type attack.” He was referring to the al Qaeda attack, in 2000, in Yemen, by a bomb-filled dinghy against a Navy destroyer, which killed seventeen American sailors.

Port security, based on Finnegan’s excellent article, seemed to be a patch work of informal contacts, timely expertise, insider smarts, hard work, and luck. And as far as increased inspections at the ports is concerned (for purposes of ferreting out potentially dangerous cargo)…

“Charles Schumer was pushing for one hundred percent container inspection. That would kill the port!,” a quote attributed to Shmuel Yahalom, a transportation economist at SUNY Maritime in the Bronx.

And given the huge revenues at stake here, take three guesses who has been leading the charge against tighter port security (the first two don’t count):

…Companies like Wal-Mart have been actively working against stronger port and container security laws since shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks. The Retail Industry Leaders Association, a Washington lobby dominated by Wal-Mart, actually boasted, in a 2005 report to its members, about its “continued industry leadership in opposition to ill-advised ad onerous port security measures (i.e., cargo fees, increased physical inspections).”

Another potential danger area according to Finnegan could come from the trucks that regularly access the port to receive freight that will be transported over land. According to the article…

…port trucking is a badly paid, precarious line of work, pursued only by the economically desperate. Most of the truckers at the major ports are Latino immigrants, and a good percentage of them are undocumented. (Bill Brush, of Customs and Border Protection, told me, “If you were to make a firm policy that, say, (the ports of) Los Angeles and Long Beach had to check the immigration bona fides of every trucker, you’d have a major trucker shortage. You’d have a trade breakdown.”) In May, ninety per cent of the drivers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach took part in the nationwide work boycott in support of immigrants’ rights.”

Port trucking is also a port-security problem. The Department of Homeland Security recently conducted a study of nine thousand truckers who work in the Port of New York and New Jersey. All had been issued identification cards that gave them access to the entire port. According to a draft of a study obtained by the Associated Press, nearly half of the drivers had criminal records, and about five hundred were carrying phony drivers licenses.

And what leaves the port more than anything else?

“Empty containers are the Port of New York and New Jersey’s biggest export, followed by wastepaper and scrap metal. The wastepaper mainly goes to China, and comes back later as paper goods. No empty containers arrive.”

So we send our trash to China, and they actually manufacture it into something for reuse. Wasn’t there a time when this country did stuff like that?

And speaking of our “good friend” and trading sugar daddy (do you see the same linkage here I do between this country and the Walton family?), I read this excerpt and felt like banging my head against a table for a few hours.

The main Chinese ports are essentially brand new. “New York-New Jersey is ten to fifteen years behind China in port technology,” Chang Qian Guan, a professor of maritime science at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, told (Finnegan).

Ugh.

This link takes you to a Q&A with Finnegan in which he gets into a lot more detail concerning what I’ve mentioned above, as well as the issue of mob control of the port.