GETTING X-RAYED

Coast Guard enforces cruise ship safety, but only in the US

By Noah Bruce

Awakened to the potential of massive acts of terror, the country’s transportation industry is keenly focused on issues of security. Of particular concern in port cities like Portland are cruise ships, the largest passenger vehicles in the world, with some vessels carrying close to 4000 people.

Portland City Councilor Karen Geraghty is especially concerned with the level of security enforced when passengers who have spent the day in Portland re-enter the ship. Geraghty says that though passengers undergo extensive security procedures when they board a ship at its port of origin, security is less stringent when they re-board at ports of call like Portland. This, she believes, opens up the possibility for a passenger to pick up a weapon in a port of call and re-board the ship.

“In an airport,” she says, “if you leave the secure area you have to go back through security, but on cruise ships there’s no such thing. It seems odd to me you would remove parking from the federal courthouse, but at the same time, you’ve got 4000 people getting off a ship, wandering around and getting back on, and no one’s doing anything.”

Geraghty says she is considering drafting an ordinance barring ships from Portland that have not installed proper security measures.

However, that may not be necessary.

According to Lieutenant Commander Wyman Briggs, executive officer of the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office in Portland, Geraghty’s fears are not founded. Briggs says that before September 11, cruise ships operated according to level one or low-level security procedures, but now follow level three or highest security operations.

This means that before September 11, passengers were required to show picture IDs issued by the ships that proved they were passengers and could be subject to random searches of their bags. Now, in addition to the ID checks, all passengers’ bags are either searched by hand or by X-ray. On the larger ships, passengers must also walk through a metal detector.

“I guess you should say for the larger boats,” says Briggs “like the Carnival Victory, their level of security is identical to the airports. They have the walk-through metal detector and they have all bags looked through or X-rayed.”

Briggs’s claims are backed up by passengers aboard the Amsterdam, a large cruise ship docked in Portland on September 25. A couple from Bermuda and a man from New Port Beach, California claimed that they had gone through a metal detector and their packages had been X-rayed at each port of call. However, a woman from Erie, Pennsylvania said she did not go through these procedures at some ports in Nova Scotia.

If her claims are true, they could be due to the fact that the Coast Guard’s rules are only enforced in United States ports. Commander Briggs claims, however, that the Royal Mounted Police of Canada enforce rules similar to the Coast Guard’s.

According to Lee Adamson, public relations official for the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the London-based international governing body for large shipping and passenger vessels, there is no international standard for passengers re-entering a cruise ship at a port of call. “As far as I’m aware,” he says “there is no standard. I think it would be for individual national authorities to address this issue.”

This could be a cause for concern. While cruise ships operating in the US have their own armed security teams aboard, must submit security plans to the Coast Guard, and are subject to Coast Guard inspections, different countries may enforce different levels of security. While American security is undoubtedly on high-alert, that does not mean countries where cruise ships visit like the Bahamas, Trinidad, or Iceland necessarily are.