Feature Story

Story and photos by Petty Officer 2^nd Class Henry G. Dunphy

San Diego’s mild climate and plentiful moorings make it an ideal destination for boaters, but the high volume of small vessel traffic and proximity to the international border also make it a potential pathway for smugglers seeking to bring illicit cargo into the United States.  This creates a unique challenge for the law enforcement officers whose mission it is to protect the American people.

U.S. Coast Guard members and other federal agencies came together with state and local authorities for an exercise Thursday, Sept. 23, that was designed to validate training, equipment and procedures and demonstrate their ability to detect radiological and nuclear materials in a maritime setting. This drill, and a similar one held in the Seattle region Sept. 16, targeted smuggling aboard small vessels, the movements of which are less regulated than large vessels.

The potential exists for someone to bring a nuclear or radiological device into the U.S. and deliver it direct to target into one of the Nation’s ports, said Army Lt. Col. Kevin Hart, Deputy Assistant Director for Pilots and Experimentation Division in the Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.

The scenario developed for the San Diego drill was that radiological materials had been smuggled into San Diego via small boats for distribution to terrorist cells. An incident command was stood up and a plan devised to sweep several marinas in Mission Bay and San Diego Bay using boat-mounted and handheld radiation detectors.

Law enforcement vessels equipped with boat-mounted detectors operated by the California Department of Fish and Game and San Diego Lifeguards officers searched along the matrix of finger piers in Mission Bay, while detector-equipped boats operated by the San Diego Harbor Police swept marinas along San Diego Bay’s Shelter Island. Detector operators focused on discerning the spike that would indicate a possible threat source against the signature of naturally occurring background radiation.

“Radiation is all over the place,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Eric Cooper, commanding officer of Maritime Safety and Security Team (MSST) 91109 San Diego. “For example, it can be found in bananas, pottery and clay, and it’s used for medical and industrial purposes. In a situation like this we are looking for that needle in the haystack that could represent a threat to the American people.”

Once the boat-mounted detectors located a possible source of radiation, a team composed of MSST members and other regional stakeholder agencies including San Diego’s Hazardous Incident Response Team (HIRT) and the California National Guard’s 9^th Civil Support Team moved in to pinpoint and identify the radiation.

“We come in with different equipment to determine if the source is legitimate or illicit radioactive material,” said Petty Officer 3^rd Class Christopher Pierce, an MSST San Diego member who has undergone training to identify radiological and nuclear material. Pierce said they capture a digital fingerprint of the radioactive emissions and send it to subject matter experts onshore for near-real time analysis. They also do additional surveys of the vessel to make sure smugglers are not masking an illicit source with a legal one, Pierce said.

 Though no nuclear devices were involved there, terrorists have used small watercraft in attacks before, such as the 2000 attack on the USS Cole while moored in Yemen and the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India.

Inter-agency cooperation is key to preventive detection and interdiction of radiological and nuclear threats, Hart said.

“We had the whole gamut of federal, state and local agencies working together for this exercise,” Hart said.

“This is the first time in the San Diego region that we’ve put this all together end to end,” Hart said, “from initial detection using boat-mounted detectors, to locating and identifying the potential threat sources. This exercise showed that we can certainly perform this mission in the San Diego area.”