He switches to a picture of the Sirius Voyager, a 900-foot oil tanker offloading at the Richmond Long Wharf. Another controller, Henry, tells Scott there’s a tug waiting to go in there. I ask about a green dot in the Port of Oakland. They click on it and tell me it’s the Genoa Bridge, a 920-foot container ship with Panamanian registry. Along with a ship’s AIS information, they can call up the Maritime Inspection and Law Enforcement database, if they get a funny feeling about a vessel such as the Angelica Schulte, a 797-foot Liberian-registered tanker that’s now headed toward the bay.
They retain their video files for thirty days and, thanks to the R&D Center’s servers, have playback capability allowing them to retrieve earlier information on ship movements from their own or other major ports around the country.
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long with improved surveillance, today’s Bay Area Coast Guard has its own Maritime Safety and Security Team that, along with Vessel Boarding and Security Teams (VBSTs), does ship boardings and harbor patrols so reservist “sea marshals” no longer have to. The MSST has more than seventy operators, half a dozen 25-foot Defender boats with M-240 machine guns, and over a dozen trucks for towing them. Lt. Cdr. Greg Thomas, their thirty-five-year-old CO, agrees to let me go out on patrol. He’s a compact, youthful-looking officer with gelled brown hair. After donning body armor, we head down to the MSST dock on Coast Guard Island just south of Oakland to meet the rest of his crew: Coxswain Brian Hughes, Burt Wells, who’s responsible for the M-240, and Josh Bly, who’s carrying an M-16. Not only am I the only one unarmed, I realize, I’m the only one not wearing Oakley sunglasses.
They do a standard risk assessment before we head up the estuary past a great blue heron and into the harbor channel past a big container ship. A sailboat cruises by with a bikinied young woman at the wheel. She waves. Burt waves back, “ ’cause she waved at me first.” We cruise past the Chinese Eagle, a cargo ship loading scrap metal. America, of course, has a huge trade deficit with China. While they ship toys, clothing, and electronic goods to Wal-Mart and other U.S. retailers, we export scrap metal, waste paper, and air (empty containers) back to China.
“Coming up,” Brian warns. The boat’s nose drops as the twin Honda 225 outboards kick in, throwing up a roostertail of spray. We speed past the Hanjin Miami, another container ship, as Greg starts telling me about his MSST unit. “I got divers, dogs, assaulters, ROVs [robot subs], and swimmer systems to put hurt on them [“bad guys”] with sonic blasts. I’ve got entangling systems with nets to tie up [propeller] screws. We can also use vertical insertion [fast rope assault teams dropping from helicopters].”
At this point the boat’s radar fails. We keep going. Then the depth finder and radios short out; the whole heads-up suite in the metal wheelhouse fries. They try to reboot the system. No luck. We take a fast turn over our own wake, then slow down, limping back to the dock.
Greg, disappointed, transitions into confessional mode, telling me about “a big raccoon problem” they’re having on the island. “They screw with my dogs. They steal their food and water.” I ask him how good his two working dogs are. “They’re great. If a dog’s not good at bomb sniffing or acts crazy, he ends up doing mine decommissioning in Africa or somewhere. It’s rough, but better than some kid losing his legs.” I later read an article about the work of these “second chance” dogs.
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t Air Station San Francisco I talk to post-9/11 helicopter pilots qualified in Airborne Use of Force and others recently trained to fly in mummy-like CBRN—chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear—environment suits.
Up at Hamilton Air Field in Marin County, the Pacific Strike Team shows off their tractor-trailer trucks, oil skimmer boats, and a new 48-foot trailer by Featherlite, “the same guys who build NASCAR trailers.” Walking up its rear ramp, I’m shown racks of new Tyvek moon suits with hoods, air tanks and compressors, air quality monitors, radiation detectors, and a built-in lab, kitchen, and communications shack that can be sealed off from the outside world.
“It’s hazmat response on steroids,” Cdr. Anthony Lloyd explains. It’s also ready to respond to oil spills, chemical plant explosions, or weapons of mass destruction, including dirty bombs and loose nukes. Plus, they have a dozen team members qualified as commercial truck drivers in case a state trooper pulls them over on the way to the apocalypse.
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get to enjoy the upside of this “new” post-9/11 reality when I’m invited onto the 87-foot cutter Hawksbill as it sets up a security zone for one of the thousand or so “special events” that take place on the bay each year. This one is off Crissy Field at the Presidio. A stunt pilot will be flying over the bay for Oracle, the computer database company, which is having its convention in town. We motor past Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s 192-foot white yacht, Ronin. The Hawksbill’s CO, Senior Chief Stephen Tierney, radios over, asking the yacht to relocate, which it does. “Our job is to keep people out of the [safety] box,” the plainspoken forty-two-year-old chief explains.
There are four San Francisco police boats and one Marin sheriff’s boat to help out. They all “energize” their blue lights to signal the establishment of the box. This way, if the stunt plane crashes there will only be one casualty, the pilot. “During Fleet Week [when the Blue Angels fly over the bay] there are thousands of radar blips [boats] and a huge box,” Tierney tells me.
The Hawksbill has two .50 caliber machine guns mounted on its bow and a deck well at the stern holding a 17-foot RIB (rigid inflatable boat) with a 200 hp jet drive diesel. This pocket rocket has a centerboard control console and three saddle-like seats that you straddle while grabbing onto a handgrip.
The oil tanker Angelica Schulte is now sailing in under the Golden Gate as a red biplane appears overhead and begins trailing white smoke. It etches elegant loops and heart-stopping stalls and wild spirals through the blue sky above. Machinery Tech Wes Coulter hands me a float coat and red helmet as the biplane ends a big loop flying upside down fifty feet off our deck. “Oh my God, he’s out of control!” one of the Hawksbill’s crew exclaims appreciatively.
Three of us quickly climb into the RIB. Coulter takes the driver’s position at centerboard while I straddle one of the rear seats. Someone opens the gate, and we slide backward off the ramp, as the cutter is under way. Hitting the water, the jet diesel roars to life and we take off, shooting past the Hawksbill and leaning over in a tight g-pulling thirty-five-knot turn so that, like a crazed dolphin, we leap over our own bow wake. We begin chasing around the box, jagging and thumping hither and yon in a highly professional manner. I catch glimpses of the red biplane flying above, boats steering clear of us, and two sheriffs laughing as we shoot past them. I’m grinning wildly. “This is your job?” I shout to the young Coastie next to me, Bosun’s Mate Third Class Skip Aldrich. “It’s not suck time,” he agrees.
All too soon the sky is clear and we catch up to the Hawksbill, which is cruising along at fourteen knots. We aim for the stern ramp and clunk-slide up it at twenty-some knots. A young woman Coastie tosses a thick loop over the RIB’s bow post, capturing and securing the $150,000 joy ride before it backslides off the cutter. I’m just glad these young Coasties have been able to do their part protecting Larry Ellison from Al Qaeda.
On the Set of “24”
Seattle Sector commander Capt. Steve Metruck leads me into a secure conference room, part of the Puget Sound Joint Harbor Operations Center, a $5 million suite jointly paid for by the Coast Guard and the Navy. Twenty black leather chairs are pulled up around a long blond wood table with sleek speakerphones opposite a gray glass wall. A screen on the far end of the room allows for secure videoconferencing. Underwhelmed, I’m thinking that a conference room is a conference room when Steve hits a switch and the gray wall’s “magic glass” turns transparent, revealing what looks like the set of the TV show “24” on the other side. Some twenty people, none of whom look like Kiefer Sutherland, are moving around three banked rows of workstations with flat black screens faci
ng a large video wall. The wall is divided into a dozen live images including the afternoon Fox and CNN news shows. Others include a wide digital navigation map of Puget Sound, scrolling AIS listings, and real-time black-and-white video feeds showing different parts of the sound. We go out onto the watch floor.
“After all the fiber-optic cables were installed, we could barely get this floor battened back down,” Steve says, pointing at the blue industrial carpeting below our feet.
Off to our left are half a dozen glassed-in cubicles, including the sector’s search and rescue communications center. To the left, behind another wall of “magic glass” and cheaper matching gray glass, is the VTS center.
A Navy tech sitting in a Herman Miller chair at one of eighteen workstations brings up some video that was shot a few hours ago from a state police aircraft with a Navy camera mount aboard. The image pans from one of the Seattle commuter ferries under way to the new sector building we’re now standing in. The image changes from standard video to ghostly infrared and zooms in. “No heat coming from my office,” Steve jokes. With all the Ops Center’s video and graphic displays, they use Dell gaming consoles for their CPUs.
Along with the Coast Guard, Navy, Border Patrol, and police, the Harbor Ops Center works with state, city, and county emergency planners. Just now they’re getting ready for a major earthquake drill.
We go into the VTS center, where Coast Guard Chief James Smith and his crew show me more digital wall maps and explain that Puget Sound has the largest area of responsibility (AOR) of any Vessel Traffic System in the nation, one they run jointly with the Canadian coast guard in Victoria, British Columbia. He shows me live images from eight video cameras spread across forty miles of the sound.
“Our AOR could fit all of San Francisco, LA/Long Beach, Miami, New York/New Jersey, and several others,” he brags.
The Big Oyster
Back on the East Coast, I’m not surprised to find that Sector New York’s VTS also rocks, though in a less flashy “look what Hollywood inspired me to do” sort of way.
New York remains among the most vulnerable targets for terrorist attack and so has been forced to innovate. Its VTS center has twenty-eight flat-screen monitors arrayed around the room plus two big screens above the watch desk, using live video feeds, radio, radar, and digitalized AIS to track the city’s thirteen hundred daily ship transits. That’s the kind of traffic you might see spread across all of Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay combined, only squeezed into ten square miles of complex urban waterways.
This global armada of trade is monitored by three civilian operators, a watch supervisor, and a uniformed watch officer. The operators switch positions every hour tracking Channel 11 (the getting under way and harbor entry calls), Channel 14 (the Lower and Upper Bay calls), and Channel 12 (the anchorages, the East River, and Arthur Kill, on the skinny side of Staten Island) calls.
VTS training coordinator Matt Holiday points out ferries (green squares), cruise ships (blue triangles), and other on-screen traffic symbols. “I started out with a single radar screen and punch cards back in 1995,” he grins. He uses a keyboard to manipulate one of twenty-four cameras housed around the city, zooming up the East River past Roosevelt Island.
He tells me National Park Service and other cameras will soon be linking to the Vessel Traffic System. He then switches from a shot of Hell Gate, in the East River, to one from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He shows me a container ship, then pushes in from several miles out to where “it looks close enough to see someone picking his nose on the bridge.”
We go over to a map of the New York area. “San Francisco VTS bases their rules on tonnage. Here it’s more about length and draft. We don’t have the warning signals when they come within five hundred feet of each other. Here it could be fifty feet. In Kill Van Kull, in Arthur Kill, it’s maybe five hundred to eight hundred feet wide with 145-foot-wide ships passing each other at the same time.”
With New York’s hairpin turn, we go into America’s second busiest port, Newark: river traffic, narrow channels, major dredging projects, and low bridges; I’m impressed at these controllers’ ability to track as much as they do, even with the kind of high-tech cameras and playback systems you can’t buy at Radio Shack.
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s with many computer labs, I’m less than awed when I get to visit the Coast Guard R&D Center’s AIS program on the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut. It’s housed in a large beige room full of computer towers and screens, with lots of exposed cables, a few big monitors, and a few bored-seeming people drinking coffee. Their nonergodynamic pink, red, and blue swivel chairs provide what little color the room has to offer.
“This time of day we’re looking at about fifteen hundred ships,” AIS program manager Dave Pietraszewski tells me (it’s 10:30 A.M. EST). “We have about five thousand ships in the U.S. EEZ [two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zone] on any given day and are working toward a nationwide AIS system to monitor all their signals. Right now we’re getting VTS inputs from Seattle, San Francisco, New York, LA/Long Beach, New Orleans, Houston, and elsewhere [including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the offshore oil industry]. The final system will include several satellites, but the Russians, who are supposed to launch one of them, are concerned about being part of a U.S. surveillance system.”
I ask about their ability to capture past AIS activity. “That’s got lots of uses,” he explains. “Like San Francisco just had a speeding problem where one ship passed another under the Golden Gate Bridge. With our server we can go back and review it. You can bet they’re going to get slapped hard. Or there’s the LNG debate on Long Island Sound [a proposal to place a liquefied natural gas terminal in the sound]. We can go back and look at the [vessel] traffic there to see the impact a restricted area might have and use that as a planning tool.”
He tells me they’re now past the R&D stage so that the AIS servers will be moved to West Virginia, while control of the system will go to the Coast Guard’s Navigation Center in Alexandria, Virginia.
The room’s central display screen is of a map of the United States. With clicks on a wireless mouse, he takes us through several levels of resolution from the nation to the Northeast, New York, New York Harbor, and then down to a dot and a square sitting offshore. We click on the little pink square and its AIS information pops up.
“It’s the Atlantic Surveyor, a 597-foot-long cargo ship moored off New Jersey. It’s not displaying the proper code for its radio transmission. In San Francisco they’d beat him up, not let him come into port without correcting that,” Dave notes. He clicks on the dot next to it. “That’s the Princess One. With a name like that you’d think it’s a cruise ship, but it’s another cargo ship. You never know.”
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e certainly didn’t know what was coming on 9/11 and probably won’t know what’s coming next, despite our best surveillance efforts. Eighty-five years before the September 11 attacks, New York’s Black Tom Island disappeared in a horrific earthshaking blast that showered the Statue of Liberty with hot shrapnel, caused the evacuation of immigrants from Ellis Island, and could be felt a hundred miles away in Philadelphia. That July 1916 cataclysm was the result of German saboteurs setting off some two thousand tons of munitions stored on the island for shipment to Britain during World War I. In the wake of that now forgotten act of covert war, Congress gave the newly created U.S. Coast Guard authority to establish Captains of the Port to try to prevent similar incidents from taking place.
Today it’s well-armed Maritime Safety and Security Teams that are guarding our ports. I join Lt. Matt Ross, XO of New York’s MSST, at Boat Station New York, just down the road from the historic Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. I’ll be riding with Matt, Bosun’s Mate First Class Jeff Fallon, a big shaven headed ex-Marine, and Machinery Technician Second Class Rich Bassin, a short, swarthy New Yorker. We’ll be the observer boat riding along with a safety boat for two other 25-footers that will be firing their M-240 machin
e guns to keep up their training proficiency. The shooting range will be set up in open seas fifteen miles outside the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Down by the dock, the safety briefing includes a report of fifteen-knot winds and two-to three-foot chop offshore. Due to the weather, it will take us about an hour to get on scene.
Our four-boat convoy heads out under the bridge, coming up quickly to thirty-five knots. Even braced against the padded wheelhouse seats it feels like we’re experiencing a fender bender every three to five seconds. Jeff Fallon slows down to call in our location. “Sector, Position is 40 degrees north, 073 degrees west along with other three vessels.”
They radio back that the 210-foot Medium Endurance Cutter Dependable is nearby practicing vertical insertions (commando-style rope landings from a helicopter onto their deck). We speed up again, banging along in our mini collisions with the sea, before slowing and positioning ourselves near the shooter boats.
The first boat goes off about two hundred yards and starts firing at a floating tube target they’ve tossed over the side, brat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Plumes of water spout between the bow gunner and the bumper-like target as he walks the bullets toward it. He empties the first box of 7.62 mm ammo and preps a second hundred-round can. Each boat’s gunners will qualify on a day shoot and a night shoot. The bow gun can fire in a 120-degree arc. When switched to the aft mount it can fire in a 180-degree arc. Right now a second shooter with an M-16 is poised on the rear of the boat.
I step out on our aft deck with Matt, as it’s feeling a little tight inside the rolling metal cabin. The air clears my head, but tomorrow my thighs and buttocks will be black and blue. The second boat starts blasting away, a female MSST gunner harnessed to the M-240.
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