Motor Carrier Transportation Security Report

Last Friday the GAO delivered to Chairman Thompson a report on the status of the DHS efforts to secure the commercial vehicle sector. This was the third in a series of GAO reports that the House Homeland Security Committee Chair had requested about surface transportation security. According to a committee press release, the reports indicate “serious security shortcomings in all modes of the nation’s surface transportation systems”. While the report excoriates TSA, and to a lesser extent DOT, for not following through on a multitude of congressional mandates there are some positives, especially for the chemical security community. Motor carriers that handle hazmat shipments, the report notes, do a significantly better job of instituting security measures than companies that did not. Interestingly, this is a matter of concern for the writers of the GAO report:

“In lieu of a completed risk assessment, TSA leadership has decided to implement a current strategy which focuses on examining security risks posed by the shipment of hazardous materials. However, available information from ongoing risk assessments does not appear to support this emphasis, and the basis for TSA’s decision for this strategy is unclear.” (page 8)

This is actually the basis for GAO’s complaints about TSA’s security efforts. They maintain that TSA has not done an adequate job of assessing the potential terrorist risks to the commercial motor carrier sector. Nor has it conducted a systematic vulnerability assessment for the sector. Without a comprehensive risk and vulnerability assessments, the report notes, TSA cannot formulate an effective security program to protect the public from the consequences of attacks on commercial motor carrier targets. The scope of the problem of conducting these assessments is briefly noted in the report. On page 98 in Table 5 the report notes that there are over one million truck motor carriers (with almost 12 million vehicles) currently operating in the United States and almost 4,000 motor coach carriers (with 75,000 vehicles) included in the commercial vehicle industry. Even if the problem were only restricted to hazmat carriers (Table 6, page 99), it would still mean evaluating more than 60,000 carriers with almost 4 million vehicles. The only way that TSA is going to be able to acquire any useable data to do an industry wide vulnerability assessment would be to develop a web-based vulnerability assessment tool similar to the SVA tool developed for CFATS implementation. That is not going to happen without direction and authorization from Congress.