Maritime terrorist act imminent, experts warn

ASia Pacific Port Focus ^ | Feb. 20, 2004 | Australia News

[FairOpinion]

A British Intelligence group has joined, visiting UN and Australian experts warning that world ports and shipping are vulnerable to a major terrorist attack

AL-QAEDA and its associates could be planning a "maritime spectacular," Dominick Donald of Aegis Research and Intelligence told a London security conference this week.

"If a boat that didn't cost $1,000 managed to devastate an oil tanker of that magnitude, imagine the extent of the danger that threatens the West's commercial lifeline, which is petroleum," he said.

Donald was referring to concerns raised since the attack on the oil tanker VLCC Limburg.

Addressing delegates at the Intermodal Petroleum Transportation event, Donald warned that the maritime sector was an obvious and easy target.

"Maritime attacks can deliver results, as 90 per cent of world trade moves by sea and maritime traffic has a number of vulnerable choke points [such as the pirate infested] Malacca Straits, Bab-el-Mandab and the Suez and Panama Canals".

Both the tanker and the cruise sectors are "iconic and economic", Donald said.

Meanwhile former Australian transport minister Peter Morris, who nows heads the International Commission on Shipping (ICONS), has also raised the alarm that shipping could be used as a weapon of mass destruction on Australian cities.

"Any one of the thousands of foreign ships which dock each year in Australian ports, particularly Sydney, has the potential to become a weapon of mass destruction," said Mr Morris.

"The ships themselves may be the weapon," he said. "They can carry enough innocent-looking cargo - fertiliser and diesel fuel - to become the biggest bomb ever detonated in an Australian capital city or major port in war or peace."

Mr Morris said the United States, the world's largest trading nation and a prime target for terrorists, has already acknowledged the danger.

"But Australia is making itself more vulnerable than most countries by suppressing Australian shipping in favour of foreign shipping and relying almost totally on offshore-registered ships where the real owners or operators of freighters, tankers, and bulk carriers are easily concealed."

Most ships calling in Australian ports are registered in countries like Liberia and Panama, which fail to even make a pretence of knowing the real ownership of those ships.

A recent bipartisan review of Australian shipping conducted by Mr Morris and the former Minister for Transport in the Howard government, John Sharp, warned that there was conflict between the Federal Government's two aims of cheap shipping and the simultaneous strengthening of our border protection.

Mr Morris insists the Howard Government maritime security legislation last year failed to establish procedures to protect Australian ports.

Maritime security concerns have been also raised by visiting United Nations IMO official Efthimios Mitropoulos.

The secretary general of the International Maritime Organisation told a Melbourne conference yesterday that the prospect of terrorists hijacking a large ship and exploding it in a major Australian port was a "real and present" danger.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Wow, thanks for that bit of history. I recall reading that years ago somewhere, and all but forgot about it.

[He Rides A White Horse]

....and the Mont Blanc was a ship of very modest tonnage......many of us are looking at the sky; better keep one of those eyes peeled on the horizon as well.

[He Rides A White Horse]

The sea presents a whole new set of challenges.......what's to stop a ship from sailing into New York harbor packed with explosives. Before it even hits customs. Won't even need to bother.

You would have to board every vessel headed to all major US ports miles off coast to guard against such an attack.

[Joe Hadenuf]

I fully agree. The threat that is capable of floating into any of our harbors is significant.

[He Rides A White Horse]

I fully agree. The threat that is capable of floating into any of our harbors is significant.

Yes, and the way that ships are flagged seems to exacerbate the problem.

That is, a ship built in Iran for example can be flagged in a seemingly innocuous country, albeit one with lax rules for inspection, maybe a few greedy palms greased gets it underway.

It's a considerable danger, to say the least.

[B4Ranch]

Any words of wisdom for this article?

[jamaly]

Not sure how far up the Mississippi the larger ships go, but it could screw up river traffic if they pulled it off.

Ships can only go as far north as Baton Rouge. The traffic tie-up would depend on where the attack was located as well as what HAZMAT problems followed.

[Squantos]

Binary...........Stay safe !

[SAMWolf]

Thanks Jamaly.

[hosepipe]

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H. L. Mencken

[archy]

How big of an explosion would that create? Total kill zone within 4 miles?

Depends on what it might take along with it. And there are plans for building a couple of major LPG facilities on the West Coast, in Ventura County. See following:

The Cleveland Disaster

The very first commercial LNG facility built in the United States in 1941, caused A Major Industrial Accident Known as "The Cleveland Disaster"

In 1944, According to the U.S. Bureau of Mines report, LNG holding tanks failed and released their contents into the streets and sewers and their vaporous cloud ignited and fire engulfed the nearby residents and commercial establishments

The Fiery Inferno DEVASTATED Approximately One Square Mile Of Cleveland, Ohio

[archy]

Clive Cussler wrote a book "Valhalla Rising" in it the bad guys where going to detonate a large LNG tanker carring Propane in New York harbor close to where the WTC stood.In the book they said the fire ball could be as much as 2miles wide!

Back when my dad was a refinery engineer for Texaco, the interesting bit of info was passed to him that the refinery where he worked was a secondary target for Soviet nuclear weapons planned for the *Gateway Yard* railroad center in East St Louis. Nearby Scott Air Force Base was the primary target, with the railyard and refinery back-up targets for earmarked following strikes in the result they got lucky and took out Scott, a SAC base, with their first shot, which could have been either missile or aircraft delivered...or *other,* possibly in a railcar.

He did a little calculation on the result if the petroleum in-process in the plant and it's storage tanks was all released simultaneously, as by a well-targeted nuclear airburst, and came up with a crater 8 miles in diameter, with blast results out to 14 miles. The school I went to was about a mile and a half from the main plant facility.

Foes of LNG development point to the fact that the potential energy content of a single LNG tanker, which contains natural gas that is supercooled to 260 degrees Fahrenheit and concentrated to 1/600th of its normal gaseous volume, is equivalent to 700 tons of TNT or about 55 times the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

[My Dog Likes Me]

Excellent point!

[My Dog Likes Me]

After the explosion in Halifax, the city of Boston responded with a tremendous amount of aid. So each year, the city of Halifax remembers the generosity of the citizens of Boston by supplying them with the official city Christmas tree.

A nice gesture.

[My Dog Likes Me]

Thank you for your responses. I thought I would be hit by a number of flames for my post! Boy, was I wrong. I think I stumbled onto something important with my rant (and your reactions).

Our American "melting pot" has finally boiled over, and the stove is on fire. I expect more from our leaders than "another attack is inevitable..." This is not in keeping with American tradition.

I should write something for NYT or National Review about this issue. Arrgh.

[Indie]

Sorry if I offend but it has come to that point. We know who they are and all the compassionate rhetoric will do nothing, but delay the inevitable. Somehow it needs to be made abundantly clear who the enemy is..

Don't be sorry. Anyone with half a brain is with you all the way here.

[SAMWolf]

Thanks Archy.

[CyberAnt]

Fox is putting on a special tonite re the "open borders". Armed with that info and the new terrorist act, you should go for it!!

[raloxk]

"they need to stop this 'imminent' stuff"

I agree totally. Immenient implies it is about to happen any day now. I think the risk of such an attack is real, and coudl happen. But is it going to happen within the next 48 hours?

[raloxk]

Blame environmentalist. They wont allow natural gas drilling in the country, thus they increase the risk of a terrorist attack by forcing us to import LNG