New troops in war on terror: 80 million boaters

Oxford’s office is leading two pilot programs that train and arm harbor patrols with portable radiological and nuclear detection equipment, starting with Seattle’s Puget Sound. A similar program for San Diego is in the planning stages.

Many local departments across the country have been concerned with the small boat threat. The New York Police Department has scuba teams and marine units equipped with radiation detection that patrol New York waters. But few departments across the country have similar resources.

That is why the strategy is intended to create a layered defense that would create a national federal standard to operate a boat, Allen says.

The Coast Guard will work with states to establish minimum safety standards and ways to enforce the new rules. That may include requiring boat operators to have a copy of the safety certification on board with them and a piece of identification that links them to the certificate. That’s important, security officials say, because currently there is no uniform requirement for pleasure boaters to have identification on board with them on the water.

The government defines small boats as any vessel less than 300 tons.

The new strategy will not only create more awareness on the water, but additional state safety requirements could have other benefits: keeping boats shipshape and having their inspections up to date; more lifesaving equipment on board; and possibly fewer drunken people operating boats, said California’s homeland security adviser Matthew Bettenhausen.

In 2006, there were 710 boating deaths, more than 3,400 injuries and close to $44 million worth of property damage, according to the latest statistics from the Coast Guard. Of the 710 deaths, 70 percent occurred on boats operated by someone who did not have boating safety instruction.

“To the extent you can limit those kinds of problems, that means there’s more resources that can be focused on the terrorism-prevention mission,” Bettenhausen said.

“This is the way you buy down the risk,” said Mark Dupont, a senior intelligence officer with Florida’s department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Requiring minimum safety instruction may very well make the waters safer, says Mark Jambretz, a 36-year-old recreational boater in San Francisco. But Jambretz is skeptical that it would have an impact on the terror threat.

“As long as you have sailboats or powerboats running up along a giant container ship — or any type of ship — you wouldn’t be able to tell them from a boat loaded with anything else,” he said.

But Allen says the boater that is on the water every weekend knows where people fish and knows when a boat near a piece of critical infrastructure looks out of place.

“The small-boat community is not the problem,” he said. But he added that with this strategy, they would now be part of the solution.

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