Flanked by lawmakers and law enforcement authorities at a fire station at the Port of Los Angeles, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Friday unveiled a new strategy for the rapid resumption of trade after a terrorist attack at a major U.S. port.
As the U.S. Coast Guard gunboat Halibut idled a few yards offshore, Chertoff said the plan was "about making sure we spend as little time as possible paralyzed by an attack."
The 130-page Department of Homeland Security's new Strategy to Enhance International Supply Chain Security provides protocols for damage assessments of international supply lines. It also describes what kind of cargo and vessels should receive top priority based on public health, national security and economic needs.
The plan aims to streamline the maze of jurisdictions through which commerce moves, devise a chain of command and return into service key terminals, bridges, roads, rail lines and pipelines. The aim is to quickly restore the flow of commodities and goods, such as crude oil, clothing, car parts and medical supplies if a terrorist attack were to occur at a major port.
Even a brief closure of the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, the nation's busiest, would result in economic losses running into billions of dollars, federal officials said. For example, the 11-day West Coast port lockout in 2002 cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1 billion a day and required roughly six months for full recovery.
Because the United States represents nearly 20% of global maritime trade, a chemical, biological or nuclear attack would affect economic activity around the world.
Under the new recovery strategy, the U.S. response to a terrorist incident would not trigger an automatic shutdown of all of the nation's ports. The plan instead calls for a prudent and measured response, keeping some ports open based on available intelligence and specifics of an incident.
In his third visit to the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, Chertoff said that countering the threat of nuclear terrorism was a priority.
A nuclear explosion at the Port of Long Beach would immediately kill an estimated 60,000 people, expose 150,000 more to hazardous radiation and cause 10 times the economic loss resulting from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a report prepared a year ago by Rand Corp.
A more probable threat, security experts said, would be detonation of a dirty bomb, a crude nuclear weapon designed to disperse radioactive debris over a relatively localized area.
