“Sea can” is the unflattering term used by merchant sailors to refer to those ubiquitous 40-foot intermodal shipping containers that we see being unloaded at ports large and small, or trucked through the highway system. interstates in the United States, or loaded on those railroads. cars you see parading past you as you wait in your car at a railroad crossing.
These standardized steel boxes (there are actually two sizes, the more common 40-foot-long and a 20-foot-long, pint-sized box that is used less frequently) are called “intermodal” because they can be easily move by ship, train or truck without unpacking or altering the sealed materials inside. Containers have revolutionized maritime transport. In the old days, half a century ago, the wooden crates that were used to ship items by sea were too big to fit on a truck, so the materials inside had to be taken out at the dock and repacked for shipping. of surface, with predictable losses by theft and damage. No more.
Although thieves can open intermodal containers quite easily, they have seals that reveal tampering when broken and containers are generally kept under surveillance both in transit and while waiting in storage yards. They have a good track record and are easy to insure. The first person to open the sealed box in a warehouse in China or Korea is most likely the intended recipient in Europe or America, and the container will have made the journey by truck, rail, and ship simply by being moved from one form of transport to another as a child’s building block, never opening. Gold inspected.
Standardized shipping containers were probably the idea of a long-forgotten military planner after WWII, perhaps until the early 1950s. The US military began using primitive versions at that time, But it was a private sector entrepreneur, Malcolm McLean, along with an engineer, Keith Tantlinger, who developed the modern dimensions of the containers along with the ingenious corner moldings that allow these versatile containers to be safely stacked seven units high. of the ships and were easily moved with special cranes. The largest ocean vessels can now carry about 8,000 40-foot containers, and larger ships are planned. A container full of goods worth $ 100,000 and weighing many tons can easily be shipped from some dark corner of the Far East to anywhere in the United States for about $ 4,000, a shipping fee of only 4%. Intermodal shipping is a bargain.
The equivalent of some 70 million 40-foot containers move around the world each year full of cargo (this does not include the movement of empty containers). About two percent of them are inspected in the United States, much less in other countries.
Intermodal containers have proven enormously popular in ways their inventors could not have foreseen. Because they require enormous energy to melt when their lifespan ends, and because they are eight feet tall and can easily accommodate standing humans, they are often installed on shop fronts, small houses, malls. computer data and other “buildings”. “that require strong metal walls.
And there are still other uses for which “sea cans” could be put, deadly uses, including the anonymous transport of terrorist weapons.
“The consequences of a terrorist incident using a container would be profound,” says Robert Bonner, Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. “There is virtually no security for what is now the primary system for transporting world trade. If terrorists used a sea container to conceal a weapon of mass destruction and detonate it upon arrival at a port, the impact on world trade and the The world economy would be immediate and devastating. All nations would be affected. No container ship would be allowed to unload in US ports after such an event. “
The US Department of Transportation has estimated that a nuclear device the size of the one that fell on Hiroshima in World War II (about 17 kilotons) detonated in a large US seaport would kill between 50,000 and a million Americans and destroy between 150,000 million and 150,000 million dollars. $ 700 billion of wealth through direct loss of property and trade. Indirect costs could add another $ 1.5 trillion to the bill. This suggests that a nuclear bomb detonated in the Port of Los Angeles or the Port of New York / Newark would affect the economy with around $ 2 trillion in losses, beyond the cost of lives lost. For comparison, the 9/11 disaster is believed to cost the United States about $ 500 billion. How would the rest of the world react? Many believe that international trade would shut down completely. A global recession could well turn out.
Even scenarios that do not involve a device exploding would be near catastrophic. A respected New York strategic consulting firm (Booz Allen Hamilton) conducted a “Port Security War Game” exercise to try to quantify the financial impact of shutting down transportation systems. In the game, participants were introduced to the discovery of a pair of “dirty bombs” (a dirty bomb is not a real nuclear device, but rather radioactive material mixed with conventional explosives designed to spread nuclear debris over a large area and inhabited) in Los Angeles and Minneapolis. The bombs were defused in time. In response to the threat, the players ordered the closure of the two ports for three days. As more tests developed, all US ports were closed for a week and a half. The economic impact of the port closures was dire – estimated at $ 58 billion, the result of a 90-day container backlog, spoilage, lost sales, and manufacturing slowdowns.
Preventing such scenarios by preventing terrorists from using intermodal shipping containers to smuggle nuclear materials into the United States will likely require addressing the problem from more than one point of view. The most important is probably the Container Security Initiative, which conducts inspections of containerized cargo on a four-part program. First, use intelligence to target containers that pose a threat; second, preselect those containers; third, develop better detection technology that can operate outside the container; and fourth, develop tamper-proof packaging.
Yet many observers fear that efforts to improve the safety of the giant intermodal shipping industry will not improve until a “near miss” puts the business, largely anonymous, on the front page of American newspapers. At the moment, American resources are concentrated almost exclusively on the airline industry and commercial aviation, not on intermodal transport, although the latter may be the mechanism of choice for cunning modern terrorists.