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Safer sailing
By ROBERT N. JENKINS
© St. Petersburg Times, After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, cruise ship companies added about a dozen steps to their usual security procedures -- at the dock, on the water and even below the waterline. "The industry is working very closely with a task force that includes the FBI, INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), Customs, the Coast Guard (and) the International Maritime Organization," said Stein Kruse, senior vice president of marine operations for Holland America Line. "We are now at the highest level of our safety management system," Kruse continued by telephone from his Seattle office. "Every vessel and every port of call is checked. . . . We have no problems with it." Among the steps: Every piece of carry-on luggage is X-rayed and checked by dogs trained to sniff out explosives. "This was implemented the day of the terrorist attacks," said Michael Crye, president of the International Council of Cruise Lines, an organization representing 16 companies with more than 90 vessels. All luggage consigned to terminal porters is also X-rayed and sniffed. All of the crew's movements to and from ships are monitored, and any packages brought by them to the ship are being scrutinized. Passengers' packages are also being X-rayed upon reboarding the ship in port. No visitors are allowed inside the terminal buildings, which provide access to the ships -- similar to the ticketed-passengers-only security added before airline passengers can reach their gates. "Normally, the ship might open up, to show itself off to residents and other nonpassengers," explained Rafael Guzman, security director for San Juan, Puerto Rico's busy port and airport. "But not anymore. No one gets into the terminal but passengers and crew." The Coast Guard, or local law enforcement in foreign ports, "will escort the ships to and from their berths, then create a 100-yard secure perimeter," said Bob Dickinson, president of Carnival Cruise Lines. "That's something we learned from the USS Cole," the ship damaged by suicide bombers while it refueled a year ago this month in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed. "Will you always see a perfect ring (of security) around the ship? Probably not," said Coast Guard Petty Officer Danielle DeMarino of Miami, the busiest cruise port in the world. "And the vessels might be the Florida Marine Patrol, but there will be a perimeter." (The Florida Marine Patrol has been merged with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation agency.) San Juan's Guzman said that cruise lines, which last year brought more than 1.68-million passengers to San Juan, had even offered him their lifeboats as patrol vessels, to be staffed by local law enforcement officers. Much of this activity would be obvious to passengers, but there are other procedures they will never become aware of, such as the profiling of crew members. Though the majority of cruise passengers are American and the ships are owned by American companies and based in American ports, the overwhelming number of onboard employees are from less-developed nations. Holland America's Kruse estimates that there are at least 20 nationalities represented aboard his line's 10 ships, a large percentage of them from the Philippines and Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country. With the end of the Soviet Union, more and more central Europeans have found jobs onboard as waiters, cabin stewards and salesclerks and in below-decks areas. (Most officers are western Europeans -- Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, British -- and are graduates of their national maritime colleges.) "Shortly after the terrorist attacks, we were profiling our crews," disclosed Dickinson, from Carnival's Miami headquarters. "We did not remove anyone from the ship, (but) the profiling went beyond just checking passport names and numbers." He declined to elaborate, but he and other executives interviewed did say that before every sailing, the INS now receives a manifest of both passengers and crew members who are supposed to leave on that vessel. These names are matched against lists of criminal suspects. Among the onboard workers for Holland America, Kruse said, are former members of the FBI and the Dutch and British military intelligence agencies. Their job is to assess any risks, utilizing information supplied by the federal task force and purchased from the private International Maritime Security Co. of London. Kruse discounted the idea that any Holland America crew members might be planted agents. "We have people who have been on our ships 10, 15 years. We have fathers and sons serving the same ships." And Dickinson pointed out a more practical matter: Most of the employees below the officer ranks "typically have signed a 10-month contract. . . . You'd have to be a superb actor to stay undercover that long." Another added security measure is having the docks, mooring areas and the ships' hulls checked by divers, both in U.S. ports and in some foreign destinations. "We had done this on cargo ships, to check for smuggling," Guzman said, "but it is being extended to the cruise vessels" on a random basis. And on the docks, there are more uniformed security personnel. "People in uniform, people out of uniform, we are adding them," said Guzman with a chuckle. "We want to create an atmosphere that will give passengers peace of mind. We are Puerto Rico -- we are the United States. When you are here, you are at home." Said Dickinson: "I don't know of an island without more uniformed personnel" now guarding ships in port. "We do have ways to stop a gang of (armed attackers) from running up the gangway. But I won't say how." And onboard the ship, he continued, "The bridge is sealed off, with combination locks on the doors. I cannot enter without the officers' help. Anyone approaching would be seen before they got to the area to get to the area to get to the bridge." Dickinson would not confirm that he was referring to the surveillance cameras most modern ships have in place. Instead, he said, there are "at least eight other steps" in the industry's increased security procedure, "but I cannot divulge them." As for trying to board a cruise ship at sea, Dickinson noted that the majority of these vessels have no open deck space lower than 40 feet above the water. "You couldn't approach in a 100-foot yacht -- we are much higher than that." Nonetheless, "We always have someone watching for any approach at sea." He also called cruise ships an "unlikely target for terrorists: They want to create symbols, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the Pentagon with most of one side gone. What do they get by sinking a cruise ship?" Perhaps reflecting the public's similar dismissal of the ships as targets, Carnival's fleet sailed last week at 106 percent occupancy. Cruise lines' practice is to count all of the lower two berths in a ship's cabins as 100 percent of its space, even though most vessels have third or even fourth bunks in some cabins. Thus, occupancy rates above 100 percent. For industry giant Carnival, "This time of the year we (ordinarily) would be sailing at 108 percent," Dickinson said. "That's close to 40,000 passengers. And our bookings last week for future trips were 90.2 percent of what we did last year at this time." Said Holland America's Kruse: "The world is too beautiful a place not to visit it."
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From the Times Travel page
From the AP |
