Jennifer Symoun
My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Security and System Resiliency. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded.
Today we'll have three presentations, given by Joe Englot of HNTB, Barbara Ivanov of the Washington State Department of Transportation, and Dave Heiden of Landstar.
Joe Englot serves as HNTB's National Director of Infrastructure Security and oversees projects that reduce the vulnerability of bridges, tunnels, and transit facilities to malevolent acts, as well as, projects that rehabilitate and retrofit structures against the effects of natural hazards and general structural deterioration. Joe has been project manager on homeland security projects for major public transportation agencies that specifically involve the assessment and protection of critical rail and highway transportation infrastructure. Prior to joining HNTB Mr. Englot spent 33 years with the Port Authority of NY & NJ where he had engineering oversight over several freight projects.
Barbara Ivanov is the Co-Director of the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) Freight Systems Division. Her responsibilities include developing the state's strategic investment plan for the freight system, and introducing the plan to community and regional leaders to gain regional participation and support. She is currently leading initiatives to improve freight system operational efficiencies, build a data framework to monitor system performance, and develop a resilient freight system.
Dave Heiden is currently Director of Security & Cargo Loss Prevention for Landstar, which delivers safe, specialized transportation and logistics services to a broad range of customers worldwide. Dave has more than 20 years of experience in the transportation industry and is an active member of several organizations, including the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS) and numerous Cargo Security councils.
I'd now like to go over a few logistical details prior to starting the seminar. Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. Once we get through all of the questions that have been typed in, the Operator will give you instructions on how to ask a question over the phone. If you think of a question after the seminar, you can send it to the presenters directly, or I encourage you to use the Freight Planning LISTSERV. If you have not already joined the LISTSERV, the web address at which you can register is provided on the slide on your screen.
Finally, I would like to remind you that this session is being recorded. A file containing the audio and the visual portion of this seminar will be posted to the Talking Freight Web site within the next week. We encourage you to direct others in your office that may have not been able to attend this seminar to access the recorded seminar.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next week. I will notify all attendees of the availability of the PowerPoints, the recording, and a transcript of this seminar.
One final note: Talking Freight seminars are now eligible for 1.5 certification maintenance credits for AICP members. In order to obtain credit for today's seminar, you must have logged in with your first and last name or if you are attending with a group of people you must type your first and last name into the chat box. To obtain your credits, visit the AICP Certification Maintenance web site after the seminar, login using your ID# and password, select My CM log, and select add credits. I have included more detailed instructions in the file share box on how to obtain your credits after the seminar. Please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
We're now going to go ahead and get started. Today's topic, for those of you who just joined us, is Security and System Resiliency. Our first presentation will be given by Joe Englot of HNTB. As a reminder, if you have questions during the presentation please type them into the chat box and they will be answered in the last 30 minutes of the seminar.
Joe Englot
Thank you Jennifer it is really a pleasure to speak today. The presentation I am giving is about the fact that HNTB with the assistance of Weidlinger Associates Inc., did a project for the New Jersey DOT and their office of Homeland Security and Preparedness. This first slide shows what the scope of the project is. They had previously reviewed their inventory of over 6,000 bridges with a previous method available from the FHWA. They ordered the prioritization to be updated to reflect current Homeland Security and to reflect the top 50 bridges and tunnels throughout the state. They also wanted to make this multimodal to include rail, both passenger and freight, and to include highway bridges and tunnels. And also, the first step would be to do a prioritization of all bridges and tunnels, and then just state owned bridges and tunnels. After that we are going to look at the top 50 and do a threat analysis and come up with general countermeasures and mitigations. Most of my presentation will focus on the prioritization.
We keep in mind that our Homeland Security is focused on multi-hazard extreme events. It does not matter if it is from terrorism or a natural hazard. That is why this approach is looking at it in this way itself. When we talk about extreme events were are talking about seismic, vessel collisions, wind, hydrocarbon fire, terrorist attach, vehicular impact, and scour and flooding. Again, why do we focus on bridges? In each state, you have different concerns. Everyone has bridges and they are bottlenecks. In this presentation we are looking at other vehicles, but freight in trucks is always in competition with cars and looking for faster ways across state when there is a failure. If we look at the last 40 years in the United States, there have been significant bridge collapses. We see here that sometimes scour or barge collisions can cause failures and at other times its storms. There are bridges that fracture for other reasons like design error. We really look at the top bridges and focus on how that can be mitigated in one way or another. We are also looking at rail. This is an example from 1993 where the bridge washed out at night and trains ran off. Right now the focus is on preparedness. The previous screening methodology was focused on this report, Guide to Highway Venerability Assessment, and the problem with that is that it looked at too many different attributes. This was in response to 9/11. At the time, the focus was not on a systematic approach. The new approach we are looking at is a systematic approach of moving people and good through a state. I have checked off in red the attributes we are looking at. The other ones can be confusing as we are looking at a highway or railway network. If you are looking at another network like communication, it would be different.
Using new screening criteria to align with the Department of Homeland Security guidance and with the National Infrastructure Protection Plan we will look at the mission statement for transportation of both the state and the Department of Homeland Security. In this analysis, we are looking to see if we lose a bridge what are the possible detours? Again, we are going to place priorities. If it is an evacuation route, it is going to get extra priority. We are going to look at a metric to compare the movement of people and goods. Ultimately, the formula we developed does show the economic impact on the region.
These are assumptions of failures. We can't look at casualties in the first phase, whether bridges collapse from a hurricane or an act of terrorism, with the bridge full of vehicles or people, we're not looking at that, we're assuming it's a complete catastrophic collapse of a span, not saying why. It doesn't matter what kind of event causes it, we will look at volume of people and goods affected. The system we will be using is an Excel database, ranking all 6000 bridges once we develop the formula. For highway bridges we are fortunate to have the SI&A database. The FHWA requires it to be collected by every state. We will look at these parameters, maximum span, that's critical. Number of spans, number of lanes, to give an idea of the size of the loss of the bridge, other information like where is the bridge located and detour lengths, part of the database, and average daily traffic and average daily truck traffic, all data is in the SI&A database. If you go on the federal highway website you can find it for every single bridge in the country.
We are multimodal, looking at highway, rail, and whatever formulas we come up with, we have to in the end perform a reality check to verify there are redundant paths and what we are doing actually makes sense, by examining individual cases.
This is an excellent chart we obtained. The formulas are based on delay developed for highways, due to highway construction. There's many formulas developed for occasions when you close a lane for highway construction. The impact, is usually expressed in so many dollars per delay of a passenger car, or a truck. Usually truck dollars are twice the car dollars per hour of delay. In general the ratio found is that a truck is worth two cars.
To obtain this chart, we went to a meeting of the short line roads in New Jersey, this helps us equate a truck and a rail car. One hopper car is equal to four trucks. We use that in the formula; apply the same delay equations that were developed for highway construction. This is what we came up with. We made the transport unit a passenger vehicle, an automobile, we know from studies the automobile has on average 1.2 passengers. That enabled us to equate it to a passenger on a railroad. One railroad passenger is 0.83 transport units; the delay of one hour to a rail hopper car equals the delay of four trucks. Now all we have to do is determine the number of vehicles going over the bridge, which we get from the SI&A database. We will see getting the rail data was a little more difficult. We will actually measure in the top formula on the left side, the total delay of transport units in units of hours, based upon the total time the bridge is not going to be in service. If we take a bridge out of service, say it's out of service a period of time we will count the total unit hours of delay. What we are doing is taking total volume of transport units delayed times the days of downtime times the hours of delay due to the detour. The fact that the bridge is out means people are going on another route, there's always a delay due to the detour. We use a lower speed for that, plus counting congestion factors in the state, but that's really the delay, the fact they have to use another road, extra mileage, extra time.
Then we also put a factor on this, an ER factor of 1.2, 20% above the others if it's an evacuation route which ranks slightly higher.
The most important part, one of the most important parts of the formula is the downtime for loss of a bridge. This is a function of span length. We have used case studies for this. The construction time for the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a design-build schedule was as tight as could be, very efficient, and the truss fabrication time, to prefabricate, and install it, would take that amount of time for that span length. We developed a formula for that and other bridges. That's a key factor in the screening criteria.
The Office Homeland Security in New Jersey made every attempt to get information from the rail lines. The people there we talked to wanted to give us the information, but we think the problem was, of course, in a public agency the law department says why are you giving this information out? We couldn't get the same information that exists in the SI&A database. We looked in published information, and were able to get a lot, but it was very time-consuming. We can only focus on the most critical rail bridges and tunnels. Here's information that we did find. The FRA has extensive information on freight. Most states have state-wide freight studies, that show freight rail densities like that on the right. They show the amount of freight in million gross ton-miles per mile and we have data on movements on some critical freight lines of trains that we found out that we were able to use. Let me go to the next slide, some of the data we were able to get for New Jersey, critical lines had 15 to 25 average daily trains. The average train length was 61 rail cars and we then looked at detours for some of the most critical bridges. The detours are very long, whereas for a highway bridge they might be five or six miles, the rail detour is much longer since there are fewer intact lines to reroute rail traffic.
Some of these, the longer spans were over rivers, those are ones you have to look at for increased criticality, and if you have passenger trains and freight, then those really ranked even higher.
This is the results from screening the top 50 bridges in the state, looking at all owners. The state-owned bridges were about 24% of the top 50. It's interesting to note, 70% were evacuation routes. And if we look at why they rated high, they had to have either high average daily truck traffic exceeding 10,000 average daily trucks per day, 34% fell in that category, or high average daily traffic. In other words in the formula we counted cars separately, with trucks subtracted, many [bridges (38%)] had over 100,000 non-truck vehicles a day, in the top 50. We are seeing why they get into the top 50. All the numbers in the formula for delay get you high numbers. This other item, I counted the number of bridges in the top 50 that would be out of service one or more years and that was one quarter of them. These are major long-span bridges, most owned by authorities. Other agencies that collect tolls, operate the longer bridges.
We looked at passenger rail tunnels. 10% of the top 50 tunnels or bridges were passenger rail, carring very high volumes of people when you compare them to highways. And passenger rail bridges as well, when you add them, 18% of the top 50 were either passenger rail bridges or tunnels.
Freight rail, the top three ranked 52, 110 and 45. When you think of the bridges in the state, the top two percentile, those bridges are critical as well.
We looked at the state-owned bridges, to see how the old screening criteria compared to the new criteria and found 44% of the bridges now in the top 50 were not there before. That's because of the criteria. In fact, if we look at the third row, "no detour available", there were actually four bridges in that top 50 that had no detours, they served, as in many states on the coast, the barrier islands that have only one bridge. There's no detour, the delay number is bumped up much higher, set at 99-miles in the database. Those bridges that had a decent traffic volume, span length, and long detours would move to the top, true, because they are more critical.
Among the state owned bridges there were shorter span lengths, but one quarter of the 50 would have three or more months of downtime if they were lost, the time to recover them. That's significant when you think of being shut for several days what it means, being shut for three months on some of these critical bridges is very significant.
To mention how we finished up on this, we took the top 50 state bridges and found we could break them down from this database, actually break them into what we found were only seven representative bridges. We were able to do those 7, then extrapolate to the other 50 to come up with mitigations for all the bridges for the top threats and mitigations, and this is how it broke down. Out of the top 50, 37 were multi-girder bridges, similar, we looked at the longest over water, longest over land, same with the other systems. By just doing representative bridges we were able to come up with the type of threats that would be damaging to them, good mitigations to mitigate those threats, all based on a risk assessment format.
To give examples of some of the top mitigations, fendering to provide standoff protection for piers from collision or explosives, critical columns have to be jacketed, and things like closing and locking hatches and providing fencing on the lower right corner you see fencing to prevent people from getting on the structure. Those are some mitigations we found. This is a very interesting chart. For the top 50 bridges, using the pointer, we have on this [vertical] axis, the risk reduction calculated for each of these mitigations, and on the horizontal axis the cost of any given mitigation. We see the upper left quadrant is projects with the highest risk reduction for the lowest cost. Typically we see barriers/fencing are there, cameras/lighting, and protection from intumescent paint to protect a steel bridge from a hydrocarbon fire. Those would be the bridges you would want to protect. In summary, what we have from this prioritization, the criticality of every highway or bridge in the state, all 6,000 are now ranked, could be sorted that way and things prioritized that way. We could also use this as a tool for how we invest funds for security, but also for state-of--good repair. All 50 bridges should be kept in a state of good repair because they are critical to be rehabilitated. It's a good risk-based methodology that qualifies for Homeland Security grant funding, if you are doing mitigations to these, emergency planning for rerouting; and it's a good tool also if you are looking to add new crossings. This would tell you where to add crossings, which are more critical and which could use redundancy.
This could also, as we know, be used to do the detailed vulnerability assessment, and be used for development of budgets. Once we had all the mitigations for the top state bridges, we could sort it by county, or by cost benefit, get any kind of budget, if the state had money for security they could spend it on the best use for the top bridges.
That's the end of my presentation.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Joe and thank you to those of you who posted questions. We'll address your questions at the end of the seminar. We'll now move on to Barbara Ivanov of the Washington State Department of Transportation.
Barbara Ivanov
Thank you for opportunity, and for listeners to take time out of their busy schedules. Joe made a lot of great points. You will see state DOTs taking a bit of different approach in several of the planning concepts, as well as response concepts. Again, it's a wonderful opportunity for discussion when comparing and contrasting how to approach the issues.
So, can your state recover from major disruptions to freight systems? My presentation will cover three things. First item is why resiliency of freight systems matters to a state, and MPO or a local jurisdiction. Second; what are the eight steps to a resilient state plan and what to do while trying to implement the steps. There have been twists and turns along that trail and I would be delighted to share them with my colleagues.
First, why do freight disruptions matter? You just heard Joe talk about how they account for the economic loss due to a major closure of a bridge facility. We also have traditionally used a method that multiplies the number, volume of trucks, times the hours of delay, times some amount that is a direct cost to the trucking company.
In the recent past, when we were faced with repeat floods of I-5, there were no practical alternative to I-5 for truck freight on the West Coast, it's the only corridor, we don't have a redundant system here. We took a couple steps further and interviewed and surveyed not only truck freight companies, but shippers who run private fleets and freight dependent industries. What we learned what, in just two short-term disruptions, each was about a three or four-day closure (of the I-5 system and the I-90 I will refer to next), our state lost almost $75 million due to those two singular events. What's interesting, when we did that work, actually asking companies how they were impacted, we learned that about 40% of the direct impact was due to lost revenue. About 5%, a small, but significant amount was due to the investment they needed to make in the future to prevent future loss. The direct additional cost to trucking companies is about half the total direct impact. That opened our minds up to a new understanding of total impacts, and the other important thing about this, the economic loss affected freight dependent industries in and across the state regions equally. There was a slight increase in amount the close proximate regional freight industries lost, but for the most part, whether in Spokane, Vancouver or Seattle, the impact was similar due to the closure to the I-5 corridor.
One thing you can see on this map of Washington State is that for the I-5 corridor - there's no practical alternative route. The close detour can handle about 800 units total a day, passenger and/or truck. The closure area here on I-5, typically handles over 10,000 trucks, just trucks, per day. You can see that 90% of these trucks are going to have to go somewhere else, than use this detour. The next detour is hundreds of miles longer.
So what happened in the I-90 closure in Washington State? We have mountain passes that run through the middle of the state, they really separate the west side from the east side of our state, and we have, certainly as we approach the storm season, and storm season in the past due to avalanche danger, the need to close the mountain passes. In the incident in 2008, it was closed for almost four days with no opportunity for trucks to pass.
If you close the mountain passes as we had to, the I-90 truck corridor east/west was closed, there was no alternate detour except a long drive around the Oregon side and I-84 had to close at one point because of ice.
Again, what was the freight-related economic impact? I want to be very clear this does not account for the damage to the local community, damage to the local infrastructure, as those are counted separately. This $75 million of damage is due to two highway closures. It only accounts for the freight-related impact on trucking companies and freight dependent industries throughout our state.
So it matters because it hits our states economy. How can we develop resilient state freight systems? I will talk about developing resiliency, and leave the experts to talk about preparation and response.
Resiliency is defined as the ability to rapidly restore service after a disruption. We had the privilege of working with the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, developing a plan that any state could use, actually asked them to make sure it was a plan that any reasonably intelligent person could use, not just an MIT graduate, so we could take the plan';s logical structure, look at the items, work on them step-by-step and that's what they produced.
The eight steps in the plan begin with your need to know how your supply chains operate on those facilities in order to protect your state's economy. In our state we have three meta-supply chains: global gateway, made in the State of Washington, and delivering goods to you. I will come back to that. You work with those customer groups to understand their goals for recovery. It would be great to recover within 10 minutes 100% of the facility, but that could be awfully expensive. It would imply you have a spare freeway. There's a cost risk analysis you want to go through. These (examples shown on the slide) are not our goals, but for a Global Gateway system, as Washington State has, corridors that serve the entire nation through a port returning to a set level after some period of days to meet their needs, the goals are set by customers.
Delivering goods, that's how we get our water, food, healthcare supplies, and restoring truck access to some level within some time period is set up based on your own risk/reward analysis.
The third step is to analyze vulnerabilities, and I think Joe presented really interesting information about how to go about doing that. We suggest you also need to consider not only the infrastructure, but the vulnerability of different customer segments and how they use transportation infrastructure and where their vulnerabilities lie.
The fourth step is to engage your private sector partners, build the relationships and develop a communication plan designed for their needs with them. The center of the plan is the freight notification process. The fifth step, you need todecide what policy, regulations should be in place before a disruption occurs. Sixth step, decide how to set priorities, again, before the event happens.
In the example I used with I-5, we had one near detour, again, only 10% of the trucks would be able to use it if that detour was even available. Who gets on? Is it the guy with the governor's home phone number? Is it the really loud by guy, or the most important? How do you decide that? Whatever your situation is, when you have lost capacity, who gets to use what is left and available?
Number seven is running a failure analysis simulation. That helps us do our long run planning to understand where that critical infrastructure lies and to what types of industries - freight dependent industries - are there high vulnerabilities, and then test to improve by running exercises on it.
Let's dig a bit into the steps. Step one, we identify the three big categories. Global Gateways means manufactured goods coming from Asia, primarily involving our West Coast port system, that land bridges across by rail, and oil coming down from Alaska. Made in Washington, in our freight system we are proud to be a Global Gateway, but also care about our eastern side of the state';s agribusiness sector, western side's timber sector, manufacturing centers along the I-5 corridor and in the urban areas. And we care a lot about whether or not our consumers are able to get the goods they need to make it through their day.
What do they need? When we worked with MIT, and I want to emphasize this, we were present in all of the interviews with the state freight customers. We really make a purposeful direction to gain customer intelligence by working with them in their place of business, going to wherever it's convenient for them to understand their continuity plan, how they need government to act, and letting them set the goals. So when we did that with our colleagues at MIT, we learned they have no idea who in government to call after an event happens. They rely on the media because there's no freight-specific information; there was none at that time for them. There was no communication system in place, allowing any government agency to communicate directly with them, and they value accurate timely information above all else.
One of the planning tools that we are developing, I think, is, again, an interesting way to compare, contrast what we are doing, is a supply chain based model of our state's freight systems. With the University of Washington, we';ve developed the state';s first GIS-based freight system model. This model will allow us to see how those freight-dependent industries would reroute goods if there is a closure or severe capacity restriction of our freight corridors. It gives us a chance to look at the supply chains. Which are the most vulnerable to which particular closures on which corridors?
We illustrate that with two case studies. We worked on one in agribusiness, very important to, again, the eastern side of the state. And diesel fuel distribution, that's a fundamental need in our delivery system.
Potato growing and processing is concentrated here in the eastern part of the state, some growing areas are here in Northwest Washington as well. If you close the mountain passes, remember this is not an imaginary event, it frequently happens, the typical east/west routes are all closed from the processing growing area to the big consumer market where they will divert.
That's a very different pattern of diversion from the diesel fuel distribution. Diesel is shipped around the coast by tanker, barge, and inland by pipeline, and sent out from the terminal rack by truck to the final leg of distribution so you can see how the terminal rack distribution patterns look as a normal pattern in our state. However, if that group of mountain passes is closed, you can see how the distribution pattern changes and reaches out from each of these terminal racks to a greater distance to cover, again, the same territory.
So those different supply chains are an interesting set of case studies because it shows how, in addition to just looking at volume on these facilities, we need to understand how our freight dependent sectors use those facilities. We know from this work that a potato, agribusiness, traffic pattern is very, very dependent on east/west truck trips on I-90, between the growers and the market. They are not going to drive around. They will wait it out if they can. What does that mean? You could postulate for their ability to be a reliable provider of product.
Terminals to fuel stations, resiliency is built into the system, the diesel truck marketers are all the time shopping price and will drive actually pretty long distances from rack to rack if they can get a lower price to sell in the market. And so again, diesel distribution';s not dependent on I-90, and is much more resilient than the potato system for disruption of the I-90 corridor.
I want to come back, away from the planning tool, and talk about practical operational steps we are taking to improve our resiliency. The freight notification system has three essential elements; number one is internally we have to have situational awareness. We have to know, and be able to communicate internally about the information that is picked up by a maintenance supervisor in a region out in the field, send that to the freight central communications system, set up a robust distribution service (and I want to emphasize, there's a lot of commercial companies that provide this at low cost now days) and maintain a freight customer database so you can distribute that in real-time.
The highest value of this system is our ability to provide predictive information so they can plan ahead. In the case of the I-5 closure referenced earlier, we are able to tell them we are about to close I-5, there's a high probability it will close at 4:00 p.m. today, so start moving staff and equipment for that.
Here's an example of one of the type of notices we send out. I want to also explain another very high-value operational service that we are developing currently with our state emergency management division, part of our military department, and the state patrol. We are developing a new commercial vehicle pass system to safely authorize emergency, essential, and other goods delivery to and through affected areas during a highway disruption of two to seven days duration. We have pre-authorized at a policy level, our state said there are three goods categories and here's their definition. Category A, emergency, is determined by the state EMD and depends on the event. If we have a volcano - air filters, flood - generators, earthquake - maybe it's canvas tents. They set that up during the various events, and the system is flexible to accommodate that. You can read the list, it';s the things that keep the communities functioning during and immediately after, and support recovery.
Category C is everything else as detour capacity allows. We will implement this online pass system, first quarter, January 2010, trucking companies and shippers will be able to print out a pass. It will allow them to be waved through the checkpoints on a highway detour, depending on the priority of goods they are carrying.
What have we learned in all of this?
Number one, response does not equal recovery. The skills, objectives, resource needs are quite different. So, my take away is, if you are sitting in the command with fire chiefs, county sheriffs, maybe the FBI, police folks, you are going to have to bring a strong negotiating position to help them understand what will facilitate economic recovery and delivery of those emergency and essential goods through the system.
Number two, both the public and private sectors have to jointly own this, part of developing it is to understand the roles in recovery plan and how to communicate throughout. We have to have a high-value user-friendly freight notification system, so the shippers and truck carriers have not only real-time road conditions, but predictive information, so they can plan. For pre-planning mechanisms, fast-track recovery, and be able to manage freight lane scarcity, ours is the commercial pass system.
We have reports online we are happy to share with you, and I want to thank you for your time, I will be happy to take questions at the close of this session.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Barbara. We'll now move onto the final presentation, given by Dave Heiden of Landstar.
Dave Heiden
Good morning everyone. I am going to talk about the 10+2 Program, a good program, created a lot of work for companies. I will touch base on that and the TWIC cards and disaster relief that go along with that. I will put a scenario together, sort of like a disaster happening, at the Port of LA, the economic causes which it would create.
CBP (Customs Border Protection) has come out with new requirements for importing goods into the United States, before it gets into a container. This is more the legal side of it. It's all electronic, for a forwarder stuffing the container these 10 elements are things that are required now before the good is put into the container. It's required you let US Customs know 24 are hours in advance of what's going into it. I am sorry you have to let them know 24 hours in advance before it's stuffed, they could still reject that being loaded on to a ship.
These extra steps have caused extra man hours, you might be moving something from China manufactured in China, but also have to know where the goods originated from, and the raw materials came from. Even though you are moving freight for a customer out of China, the raw goods come from Bangladesh; you need to know where and who the customer was in Bangladesh to get the information. It can be quite time consuming alone to get that information. It can delay if you can't get the information you can't get stuff in the container and moved to the United States. There's a lot of extra work and man hours that go with that, some customer's freight will be delayed.
The effective on this was January 26, 2009, and it's been a soft enforcement through January 2010. All indication is it will go to be active on January 26, 2010; no information coming down saying it will still be a soft enforcement. That is a system that will be live, continue forward. It's obviously something that worked well. We haven't had problems with the ports, any goods coming into the ports. I think the extra effort needed from the forwarders to get the information to US Customs before loaded on the ship is obviously working out well for our own Homeland Security.
TWIC is Transportation Worker Identification. Anyone working on a pier, delivering goods onto a port needs to have the card. There was quite a backlog for these; it was a four to six week wait for anyone to get one. It required finger printing, required a background check, federal background check to be cleared for this. If you had a HAZMAT, one of our drivers had a HAZMAT endorsement he was half way there, he already had the federal background check done, but needed to be processed to do the fingerprinting.
For drivers, they look at it as additional cost to pick up. The trucking companies look at it as required the driver, if he wants to pick up freight from the port, have that availability; he has to pick up the cost. Other trucking companies pick up the cost themselves. At a cost of $132.50 per driver, a card good for five years, it's quite expensive for the trucking company or for the individual.
There's a lesser cost of $105 if you have HAZMAT endorsement, but you might not gets the full five-year term availability of the card. About 35 percent of our drivers have TWIC cards. Last week I looked at enrollment, over 1.4 million have enrolled, and 1.3 have picked up the card, completed the process. The TWIC card is a biometric card, and the port should have a reader to confirm the authenticity of the card. All drivers picking up or delivering to a port needs to have a card, all co-drivers need to have a card. All passengers need to have a TWIC card; anyone can get a TWIC card. Some ports have another card you have to have for access into certain parts of the port. Say you have a federal background check and you are a good person over all, the port may require a $40, $50, $80 their own port card for the driver to know what access throughout the port. So there are other expenses, and every port can have their own card.
A driver delivering to several different ports may end up having multiple cards. Picking up from different ports, Miami, New Jersey, they need a card for each. That is a lot of cards and can get expensive when you add it all up for the driver. A lot of drivers look at it as an extra cost of doing business, won't take freight, and some trucking companies got away from it, or some think of it as another layer of inspection for the homeland.
What would happen if the port shut down, it was hard to find information on the actual shut-down of the ports back at 9/11, but I can equate when the longshoremen in Los Angeles were on strike for nine days, they estimated that loss of revenue was $1 to $2 billion a day for the nine days the strike went on so the impact of shutting down a series of days if there were a catastrophic event, hard to say what that would equate if the ports were to have to shut down.
Local drayage companies, have no work, their whole line of work is to move containers off the port to a rail yard. If you look at Los Angeles as a the area of a disaster, if a bomb went off, something like that, you would have an influx of equipment, any trucking company would as well, freight that is destined for there that can't get empty, flow of trucks coming in, with goods and the trucks coming in with disaster relief, like Barbara talked about. We handled a lot of hurricane relief with FEMA, FAA and you have that constant flow of goods coming in, whether water, food, generators, in hurricane situation tree grinders. Because it's ordered doesn't mean that will be emptied right away either.
There's so much more that goes on with moving the trucks around, other detours, fuel availability. Are trucks going to be able to keep fuel in the tanks? Quite a bit going on when you do disaster relief. There's quite a few truck and rail cars, the amount of business every day touched by the port system, infrastructure is incredible, to think that we have 30,000 trucks, 6,500 rail cars every day that are going just on the normal business day.
The stock market would be a major problem as well, for the whole country. Also, as you are moving freight into an area, again, like Los Angeles, if there were an area there was a problem, it gets very costly to move freight in there. As you get the new freight demands from whatever emergency response would be from the State of California, giving direction for new freight, ordering 50 trucks of water, trucks with generators, the cost to deliver goes up, you can't get freight out because of the disruption of the economic flow of freight. So the rates will increase to get a load covered to go into the disaster relief area.
That's really about all I had to talk about here. There's a brief description of the flow of goods, but I can tell you LANDSTAR does feel the new CBP requirements, the 10 plus 2 or the TWIC cards, certainly needed to protect this country, keep the flow of goods moving at all times. I didn't touch base on the plus 2. The plus 2 are the ship's responsibilities, they have to report where the container is on the ship, notify US Customs 24 hours before they reach port as well, of their goods, and such.
That's all I have to talk about that, I will turn this back over.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Dave. I'd now like to start off the Q&A session with the questions posted online. Once we get through those questions, if time allows I'll open up the phone lines for questions.
Jennifer Symoun
Dave, I will start with you. Does a TWIC card stay the driver or trucking company?
Dave Heiden
It stays with the driver, you register what company you are with at the time, but it stays with the driver.
J. Symoun
If TWIC cards are unique to a port, why do you need to have multiple cards?
D. Heiden
The TWIC cards are universal for the ports, but each port like the Port of Miami might have different access levels throughout the port, so that's when they require their own card. The TWIC card can't accommodate when you come into Miami you are restricted to this area, not these. They come up with their own port card as well, to keep order of who is supposed to be in what areas of the port.
J. Symoun
Okay. Thank you. We will go backwards through presenters here. Barbara, here is a question for you. Are railroads more resilient to highways for adverse weather?
Barbara Ivanov
I cannot speak for all railroads, but I know that on the West Coast, we have some experts maintaining their systems; they have a very strong rationale to do that. They will lose millions of dollars an hour if they can't continue to deliver goods. If we can get them access to the rail lines, they are certainly fast and good at reopening. The highway system, again, I salute my brothers and sisters in the fields, they do an incredible job, but there can be some length of time if there's actual damage to the highway.
J. Symoun
Okay, I believe the next one is for you as well. I do not know which slide this is in reference to, but it was: did analysis suggest that additional terminal racks should be established?
B. Ivanov
No, it wouldn't be our role. The analysis suggested that, again, the terminal racks, because the way our system is built, very reliant on large, as well as pipeline, we have pipelines coming in from the East, and down from the North. If there is a highway disruption, central part of the state, there is not a significant impact on a last-mile delivery of that diesel product.
J. Symoun
Is the resiliency plan part of a larger freight plan or a stand-alone strategy?
B. Ivanov
I would say part of the larger framework we think about. I come back to identifying your customers first, targeting those customers with strategies that serve their needs. That is the basis of our state freight plan. That's the basis of our operational improvement plans, as well as our capital investment plan. Resiliency started out as a hobby job for me, but because we have continued weather, we get to practice recovery from our major freight highway corridors on a regular basis, have developed these services.
J. Symoun
Okay. Thank you. We will now move on to some questions for Joe. Are there any sources of research or documentation that correlates the impacts, especially economic impacts, with the long-term growth of bottleneck and choke points? Are you on mute? I am not sure if we lost Joe.
Joe Englot
This is Joe. I think I wasn't connected for a while. Sorry. The question was about all of the information used was based on formulas based on highway construction. This is we're looking at delay; you know we are not looking at long-term delay, looking at delay due to construction. Say you have a construction project two years; these formulas were developed for those type of projects, the impact of delay of something like that, something infrequent not the impact of people actually changing their routes. If you had a long downtime of 12 months to a year, you would have new patterns developing. That's not built into the formulas.
J. Symoun
Okay, how do you consider in your analysis the amount of non-critical discretionary travel that falls off in the even of disasters?
J. Englot
One thing, we talk about discretionary travel, we are using average daily numbers. We don't have peak holiday periods in there in these numbers. But I have to say that looking, just looking at data after 9/11, the transportation between New York and New Jersey, we definitely see people are more flexible than goods, people find ways to get to work, taking rail instead of driving, there was a lot less traffic on some of the bridges because of that, opens them up more to cargo. There should be thoughts that since in essence there's more resiliency for passenger travel than freight. In an emergency, emphasis could be put on reducing the passenger traffic, and having them use mass transit systems, especially in urban areas. That would open things up more for freight.
J. Symoun
The next question, how did your risk take into account sea level increases?
J. Englot
When we look at extreme events, we are thinking of climate change. We see much heavier rain events, wash-outs, things like that. In terms of sea level change, it's not really in our numbers, but it does come into the bridges that are the only bridge connecting to some of the coastal areas. There could be large flooding a lot of times in those type of event you have very adequate notice for evacuation. The 70% evacuation routes tell us they could be affected by sea level rise over time.
J. Symoun
Thank you. We have another question for Dave. Is there a process in place to verify the information on the 10-2 reports?
D. Heiden
Well, you basically have to give it to the best of your knowledge. Some is difficult to get, depending on the part of the country, but from talking to people that actually do the day-to-day, you have to give the best information you can possibly get. And to say this is the best information I can get, if it's rejected you have to go back and get more. US Customs gives a bit of leeway; you have to provide the best of your knowledge.
J. Symoun
Another question, don't the marine shipping lines have divergence contingency plan if there's a disruption at a specific port?
D. Heiden
I would imagine there's a plan there, but I don't have that type of information.
J. Symoun
We have a question I will put out to all three speakers, they said you all three have excellent points about freight security. Do you have any thoughts on the broader field of transportation security? Joe, if you have thoughts on that.
J. Englot
In terms of freight security, one of the big concerns for freight security is the rail freight. Rail freight routes are very limited. We see that over time our rail line, track beds have disappeared, we only have track beds where there are single route that's serve certain areas. What can happen there, any hazards, the big concern with security are the hazardous materials transported. With hazardous materials it's easier to route around critical cities with highways, than rail. That's my biggest concern, hazardous materials being transported through major urban areas. I think that is something that needs a lot more analysis work.
J. Symoun
Barbara?
B. Ivanov
I am not a transportation security planning expert. I will defer to Joe here. At least in our state, perhaps in others, there is no highway redundancy either. So you have the wonderful, almost spider-web of highway connections on the East Coast, other states, and we do not. We can't count on redundancy out here for highway or rail.
J. Symoun
Dave, do you have any comments?
D. Heiden
No, when there's a disaster going on in an area we are quick to pick up the phone, talk to State DOT, find out what's going on, what roads are closed. You put relief goods in an area it's crucial they are not stuck in an area with a bridge washed out or infrastructure problems in the area. We try to get all the information we can to keep the trucks rolling.
J. Symoun
Thank you. Barbara, we have a question for you, what role do the MPOs play in the development of the Washington State plan?
B. Ivanov
They are very helpful. In particular, in a couple ways, the debriefing after each storm season and disruptions. The MPOs in affected areas represent counties, local government interests and help us understand how the detours, lack of detours, impact their community. Having a strong relationship with them is absolutely critical. The kind of information they come back with, that local street knowledge is very, very important to us and our planning. I would say, also a beneficiary of having more clarity in the plan. Some of the MPOs on the I-5 corridor have been very progressive, advanced in terms of setting up preexisting detours for highway disruptions, and some just haven't taken those steps yet.
J. Symoun
Thank you. Joe, we have another question for you, you mentioned the dangers of shipping hazardous materials through metropolitan areas, do you know of projects or new infrastructure that has emerged?
J. Englot
I don't know of any, but I do know that all these routes are very closely scrutinized and all of the rail lines have taken extreme measures to increase safety in those areas, but that's still an area, if we are planning new routes, we should be thinking of that. There are routes where you will have hazardous materials traveling and we should think of rerouting in areas of lower populations. The current practice I know of, extreme care is taken on these routes to keep, actually monitor those movements and keep close track of them, actually monitor any kind of behavior that takes place around those routes, so there's a lot being done, but what this does, you have a high operating cost to do that, to keep doing that, whereas you want to lower the cost by building new routes where you could reroute in certain areas that people are less vulnerable to hazard.
J. Symoun
We don't have anything else typed in right now so we will open the phone lines. Continue typing questions, though.
Operator
In order to ask a question on the phone press star 1, unmute, record your first and last name when prompted. To withdraw your question press star 2. Press star 1 to ask a question. One moment, please. At this time I am showing no questions on the phone line.
Okay, well, if we don't have any questions, we will go ahead and close out a little bit early today.
J. Symoun
Thank you all for attending today's seminar. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website.
As a reminder, if you are an AICP member and would like to receive 1.5 Certification Maintenance credits for attending this seminar, please make sure you were signed in today with your first and last name or type your first and last name into the chat box if you are attending with a group of people. Please download the evaluation form and email it to me after you have completed it. Please also download the CM Credit instructions if you are unsure of how to obtain your credits for today's seminar.
The next seminar will be held on December 16 and will be about Freight Fee Structures.
If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to visit the Talking Freight Web Site and sign up for this seminar. The address is up on the slide on your screen. I also encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
