August 7, 2004Sour Surprise for Officers Who Raided Container Ship
In what it called an "ongoing law enforcement operation," the United States Coast Guard stopped and boarded a huge container ship off the coast of New Jersey last Saturday. An anonymous but unusually detailed e-mail message had warned of a dangerous substance, with the hint of a link to terror. The Coast Guard scoured the ship. Tests were conducted. Days passed. Yesterday, the results came back: lemons, up to a million of them. Not dangerous, as far as could be determined, but not suitable for lemonade, either. The Coast Guard, in a press conference, said it had yet to find a hazard, biological or otherwise, associated with the Argentine lemons bound for Canada, but it planned to destroy them anyway. The Coast Guard said the Agriculture Department had received an "unconfirmed anonymous report" on July 29 that five truck-size containers, carrying lemons, had an unknown "harmful biological substance." The warning named the ship and gave the container numbers as well. Besides the e-mail warning, however, there was little about the vessel - CSAV Rio Puelo, owned by a Chilean company with a German crew but flying a Marshall Islands flag - that would warrant attention. It had not been to the Middle East, it was not carrying machine tools or other suspect material or otherwise matching any number of complex criteria that make up the "threat matrix," established by the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection. Nonetheless, two days later, the Rio Puelo was boarded by the Coast Guard. The Rio Puelo's crew was tested for possible illness, the Coast Guard said. No one was sick. The area surrounding the lemon containers was tested for biohazards. Sophisticated DNA tests were part of the procedure. Nothing tested positive. Air spewing from the vents of the containers was tested. Still nothing. More tests, conducted in the laboratory, and still no hits. Dr. Clifton R. Lacy, the New Jersey commissioner of the Department of Health and Senior Services, which conducted many of the tests, told reporters yesterday, "We are confident that the external surfaces do not contain a hazard." But the lemons, still sealed in the containers, have not been handled by investigators. And they will not be. As a precaution, the lemon containers will be incinerated. But first, holes will be drilled into the containers and the lemons will be fumigated with chlorine dioxide gas, the kind used to kill anthrax in infected post offices, to kill any "biological agents that may be present." Each of the 40-foot-long lemon containers, roughly the size of a tractor-trailer, will then be destroyed at the Ameri-Fuel incinerator two miles up Newark Bay from where the Rio Puelo is now docked. The ash will be inspected, though, said Capt. Glenn A. Wiltshire, the United States Coast Guard commander of the port who supervised the search. "Although we don't know the probability of the threat being real, we cannot know that it is not real," he said. "Anything is possible, and we take these threats seriously." The Rio Puelo, which had been anchored 11 miles off the coast, was escorted by the Coast Guard yesterday afternoon to the Maher Terminal at the Port of Newark. The Coast Guard said the crew was never evacuated, but it declined to name the captain or give further details about the crew. Built in 2002, the Rio Puelo was in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, as recently as July 26, after various stops in Brazil - including Rio de Janeiro on July 17 - according to a maritime industry Web site. It was due in Port Elizabeth, N.J., on July 31. For their part, the operators of the Rio Puelo are saying nothing. A message seeking comment from Compa��a Sudamericana de Vapores, based in Valparaiso, Chile, was conveyed through C.S.A.V.'s office in Iselin, N.J. The message brought no response. There was no answer at the office of Oskar Wehr, the company in Hamburg, Germany, that provided the crew. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York has introduced legislation that would strengthen port security. The bill would require tamperproof containers before a ship could unload its cargo. Singapore, Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and 13 other ports have agreed to comply, Senator Schumer said, but the bill is stalled in committee. In a telephone interview yesterday, Senator Schumer said: "You can't be too careful in the post-9/11 world. But on the other hand, the authorities are going to have to make sure that when a notice like this comes down, it's not done for other purposes, by a competitor or by a crew member who's angry with the ship." He added, "You can't just willy-nilly destroy everything just because you have a message." Ronald Smothers contributed reporting for this article. |
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