By Nick Madigan, New York Times
Tahlequah, Wash. - Riding a ferry in Puget Sound is as easy as hopping on a bus in downtown Seattle, and thousands of commuters, shoppers and merchants do it every day without a second thought.
Regular ferry passengers can be smug about how good they have it, sipping coffee and gliding through the sound, gulls flapping overhead. The ferries may sometimes slow down to get a better look at passing orcas, or to spread someone’s ashes off the stern, but at least they never get snarled on Interstate 5. Advertisement
That is why there was a collective recoil here in late October when it was announced that, in another legacy of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Coast Guard planned to establish security measures that could make boarding a ferry as complicated and time-consuming as getting onto a commercial airliner.
If carried out, the plan would cover high-capacity ferries throughout the United States, but it would have its greatest impact in Washington, where a state agency operates the largest system in the country, with 26 million passengers and 11 million vehicles carried last year aboard 29 ferries running 500 trips a day.
“It’s going to be a pain in the neck,” said Katherine Bergler, 19, a nanny who commutes to Seattle from her home on Vashon Island, near Seattle. “If you delay people who’ve been working all day, they’re going to get aggravated.”
In its current form, the proposal calls for a three-tiered system of security measures according to the level of threat. At the lowest level, 5 percent of the vehicles boarding the largest of the ferries would undergo a thorough search, with the focus on closed trucks, heavily laden cars and recreational vehicles. At the next level, after federal officials declare a real or perceived threat, up to 20 percent of walk-on passengers would be scanned, along with one-quarter to one-half of the waiting vehicles. At the most extreme level, all vehicles and passengers would be searched with metal detectors and luggage X-rays, much like in airports.
The proposal’s unpredictability is drawing fire.
“That’s not very workable,” State Representative Phil Rockefeller, a Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, said in an interview. “We need a uniform system.”
A spokesman for the Coast Guard, Cmdr. Jim McPherson, said his superior officers were reconsidering their strategy. “We want to make sure we get it right,” he said.
Scott Davis, who heads the security unit of Washington State Ferries, said that there would be “operational, legal, labor and financial implications” to the Coast Guard proposal and that his agency was compiling a list of its objections to the plan, and possible compromises.
One of the biggest drawbacks, ferry officials say, is the estimated price tag, $20 million, mostly for additional personnel, X-ray and metal detection machines and, on most smaller docks, places to house them.
Security around ferries and cruise ships has already been increased since the terrorist attacks. In Puget Sound, Washington State Patrol officers and Coast Guard personnel have boarded vessels, but an effort in late spring to begin random searches of passengers’ cars was abandoned after a few days when state legislators raised questions about the need for probable cause.
On Nov. 1, the ferry system instituted security sweeps of all docks every four hours. Coast Guard vessels - some of them small, fast motorboats with machine guns mounted in full view - occasionally sidle up to ferries and ride alongside, alarming some passengers.
Precautions may well be warranted. On Dec. 14, 1999, United States Customs officials at Port Angeles, Wash., arrested a 32-year-old man who had arrived on a ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, after the trunk of his rented car was found to contain 100 pounds of ingredients for bomb-making. The man, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian, admitted later that he had plotted to set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport, and that he had received money and training at camps in Afghanistan run by Osama bin Laden.
“What are the odds of a terrorist taking over a Tacoma ferry?” asked Craig Duffey, 32, who travels from the Tacoma suburbs to Vashon Island on the ferry Rhododendron five days a week. “What could a terrorist do with this boat? He couldn’t kill 3,000 people and shut down Wall Street for a week.”
The two dozen cars that boarded the Rhododendron here in Tahlequah, on the southern tip of Vashon Island, were ushered aboard with barely a glance from the crew. Capt. Brian Handley, at the helm of the Rhododendron, which can carry 65 cars and 546 passengers over a 1.5-mile stretch between Point Defiance and Tahlequah, said he was ambivalent about the proposals.
“I like the idea of extra security,” he said, “but I’m not sure it’s practical, or even reasonable.”
The Rhododendron’s turn-around time is about 10 minutes. If searches became mandatory, Captain Handley said, that would stretch to at least 45 minutes.
“The significant difference,” he said, “is that passengers would be forced to go through security twice a day, at least, as opposed to the occasional trip to the airport. It would radically change life as the commuters know it.”