(United Press international circulated the following story by Hil Anderson on September 11.)
LOS ANGELES — The railroad tracks linking the Los Angeles waterfront with the rest of the nation is being termed a strategic economic and military asset that warrants increased federal funding for security.
A report issued on the anniversary of 9/11 by Los Angeles-area officials seeks to place the Alameda Corridor East higher up in the pecking order for transportation funding based on the tremendous amount of goods, including military supplies and equipment, that move along its tracks from the bustling harbor to pivotal rail yards east of the city.
With the critical reauthorizations of the Homeland Security and Transportation spending plans coming up, the Angelenos want theirs and other railroad links nationwide to be considered with at least the same level of urgency as highways and mass transit programs.
“The findings (of the report) indicated the threat of terrorism is a reality,” the report stated. “The national security and economic impact of a terrorist attack or system disruption would be significant not just to California but the rest of the nation.”
In some 80 pages, the backers of the Alameda Corridor seek to make the financial support of their project a matter of national security worthy of Washington’s undivided attention and support rather than just another public works project.
“The disruption cost of shutting down the Alameda Corridor East represents a $414 million disruption value each day that it is shut down,” said Greg Freeman, public policy director of the Los Angeles Economic Development Commission (LAEDC). “With this much potential economic disruption, the federal government must consider providing a specific new funding category for strategic rail trade corridors in their next Transportation and Homeland Security reauthorizations.”
The 20-mile corridor, which opened for business earlier this year, provides trains with a route between the busy ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and rail yards where lengthy freight trains are assembled for journeys to virtually every state in the nation. It was conceived as a means of speeding up the movement of shipping containers off the docks without further clogging the areas freeways with additional trucks.
Business leaders in Southern California also see the corridor as the lynchpin in a long-term plan to prevent the bustling ports from becoming hopelessly congested. When something happens to choke off that trade, such as last year’s lockout of union longshoremen, the ripple effect is felt nationwide.
“Southern California has become the nation’s primary gateway for two-way international trade,” said Christopher Becker, executive director of OnTrack, an Orange County government agency overseeing rail traffic in the county. “The Alameda Corridor East rail lines moved about $116 billion in goods based on the manufacturer’s value in 2000.”
The destruction of railroad tracks has been a guerrilla tactic since the Civil War, and U.S. officials have genuine concerns that al Qaida infiltrators might try to bomb or otherwise wreck rail lines used to move both freight and passengers.
Debriefings of captured terrorists such as Ahmed Ressam — convicted of smuggling explosives into the state of Washington in 1999 — have revealed that railroads are among the potential infrastructure targets al Qaida has considered attacking.
With around 143,000 miles of railroad tracks crisscrossing the United States, it would impossible to monitor them all, however urban commuter lines and the major rail corridors connecting with the nation’s seaports pose a higher value target, particularly to a terrorist group whose goal may be to strike an economic and symbolic against the United States.
For that reason, the report proposed that the government set aside money to help the cities along the rail lines to develop emergency response plans and pay for security measures and equipment both along the tracks and on the docks where every day an average of 27,000 cargo containers are unloaded and sent on their way to destinations nationwide. Containers have been identified by anti-terrorism experts as potential hiding places for chemical weapons or radioactive “dirty bombs” that could conceivably contaminate and shut down a major port for weeks.
“The reauthorization of the multi-year Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century (TEA-21) is currently under review by both Houses of Congress and is a great opportunity to improve the movement of strategic goods that travel by rail,” the report stated. “This legislation should be viewed as an opportunity to fund strategic rail corridors and mega projects in conjunction with the needs of Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.”
At the same, the report doesn’t try to limit improvements to high-tech security gadgetry but to include funding for general construction that, in its own way, will help with the war effort.
“Increasing capacity of rail moves more consumer and military goods, faster, but at the same time added capacity also increases the wait times for drivers at street level rail crossings,” said the LAEDC’s Wally Baker. “Upgrading strategic rail lines with overpasses and underpasses will allow increases to capacity and keep the community supporting a thoughtful growth plan of our critical corridors.”
With billions of dollars at stake in the 6-year transportation reauthorization and the competition among highway construction and the other surface transportation lobbies expected to be fierce. Convincing Congress that tightening up security along the Alameda Corridor contributes to the war against terrorism as well as the national economy is a strategy that lawmakers might find difficult to resist.