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03/26/2007 TSA Hazmat Truck Tracking Center
Since January of this year, terrorists in Iraq have adopted a new and ominous strategy – attacking and blowing up trucks carrying hazardous chemicals in heavily populated areas. One such attack in late February targeted a chlorine tanker truck travelling in a Baghdad suburb. The attack destroyed the truck and ruptured the chlorine tank, releasing highly toxic fumes that sickened 150 innocent civilians. That attack was followed a day later by a second similar attack that killed 5 and hospitalized 55 who had inhaled the poisonous gas.
“If it happened in Baghdad, it’s just a question of time before it happens here…The question is, what are we going to do about it?” said South San Francisco Fire Chief Phillip White.
It is precisely that concern that prompted the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to set up a pilot program in 2005 to test the feasibility of real-time tracking of hazardous material (hazmat) shipments carried by trucks on the nation’s highways. The goal of the program is to develop effective methods of preventing a hazmat-carrying commercial motor vehicle (cmv) from becoming a terrorist weapon of mass destruction.
The pilot project, known as the Hazmat Truck Security Pilot (HTSP) program was established under the TSA Hazmat Threat Assessment Program. In a TSA press release the agency describes the project as “…a truck tracking project that started in August 2005. We (the TSA) have awarded two contracts, and will be testing near real-time tracking and identification systems, theft detection and alert systems, motor vehicle disabling systems, and systems to prevent unauthorized operation of trucks and unauthorized access to their cargo’s.”
One key element of the HTSP is the establishment of a prototype truck-tracking center in Buffalo, New York. The concept of the truck-tracking center is similar to an air traffic control center in that it would monitor in real-time, and on a 24-hour a day basis, the movements of hazmat trucks carrying especially “high-risk materials.”
About 53,000 companies in the U.S. routinely haul hazardous materials. 800,000 hazmat shipments take place in the U.S on a daily basis. Of those, the TSA classifies 2 in 5, or about 300,000, as posing an “extreme risk.” A May 2006 TSA “National Hazardous Material Commercial Vehicle Tracking System Study,” noted the difficulty inherent in trying to track this many individual shipments. “The ability to track 300,000 shipments, analyze the data received, and forward the data to the appropriate agencies requires an extensive information/communication infrastructure and acceptable feedback from the system to keep track of material movement throughout the United States.”
The HTSP has awarded contracts for the testing and evaluation of at least three technically different, but commercially available systems for tracking hazmat-carrying trucks. Global positioning system (GPS), cellular, and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies are all being considered for this role, either separately or in combination with each other.
Tracking these shipments however is only one element of the HTSP program. In an emergency situation, information from the hazmat vehicles must be made available to the appropriate emergency response agencies on federal, state, and local levels. The truck tracking center must have the ability to notify and mobilize police, medical, and even military authorities within moments of being notified of a crises situation. This ability will require an information infrastructure that does not yet exist. Part of the HTSP mandate is to examine what such an infrastructure might look like and how it might function.
Another requirement outlined for the HTSP program is the ability to remotely disable a hazmat vehicle in the event that the authorized driver is removed from the control of that vehicle. This capability was illustrated in November 2004 when Satellite Security Systems (S3), in conjunction with the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and Interstate Oil Company, demonstrated the first remote wireless shutdown of a fully loaded, in-motion, petrochemical tanker truck from a command facility 530 miles away. The 2006 study however, noted potential problems in utilizing this capability: “…concerns center around the possibility of either escalating a situation that would put the driver or bystanders at increased risk of harm or creating an unsafe situation based on the physical location of the disabled vehicle.”
Though the HTSP program is a first of its kind in the United States, another country, Singapore, has had a similar system working for the past 2 years. Since 2005, Singapore has been using GPS systems to track the exact location of all vehicles carrying toxic, corrosive, or flammable materials. In addition, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Home Affairs, Mr. Wong Kan Seng recently announced a new requirement for hazmat vehicles. “From April 2007, we will install immobilisers on all such vehicles which means that the moment the vehicle goes off track, they will be immobilized by remote control. The recent terrorist bomb attacks in Iraq using chlorine underscore the timeliness of our efforts in this area.”
While Singapore is not directly comparable to the U.S. either in size or number of hazmat shipments, its experience does show that such a system, at least on a limited scale, is possible. The HTSP program is still in its early developmental phase and the TSA is evaluating how various technologies could be used in developing an integrated hazmat tracking system.
As the Iraq attacks clearly indicate, terrorists are aware of the potentially devastating effects of an attack using a hazmat vehicle as a weapon of mass destruction. The question is not if such an attempt will occur here, but when, and whether or not we will be able to deal with it. | 
