Drayage worries DHS
The Department of Homeland Security is taking a hard look at how to close the security gap that occurs when a container is transferred to largely unregulated, mom and pop shuttle drivers to move cargo in and out of ports.
Departmental analyses of security vulnerabilities in the supply chain have identified the drayage industry in the United States and foreign ports as a significant area of concern, said Elaine Dezenski, director of cargo and trade policy at DHS.
“There isn’t always the capability to track that trucker, and he doesn’t always show up when you expect,” Dezenski told a Transportation Table luncheon in Washington sponsored by Traffic World magazine.
Customs and Border Protection, along with other departmental agencies, have instituted several security programs since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks designed to get import/export companies to submit commercial shipping data for targeting risky shipments, and to follow guidelines for internal security controls to prevent shipments from being infiltrated by terrorists. The regulations and voluntary compliance programs like the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism tend to focus on large transportation companies, manufacturers and importers, but small, independent players like owner-operator truck drivers have fallen through the cracks of the transportation security programs.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in a recent report noted that inland carriers pose a greater security risk because governments have not figured out a coordinated approach for applying security measures to such a fragmented transportation sector.
Dezenski also said her policy shop is trying to devise more rigorous standards for allowing entry of goods into the country or a private sector approach along the lines “of some type of ISO (International Standards Organization) supply chain security regime that would be acceptable to governments.”