ASA in the News

The Providence Business News - June 11, 2007

Narragansett Firm Helps Prepare Ports for Attacks

By David Ortiz, PBN Staff Writer

ASA's Chris Galagan was interviewed about ASA's application development work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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A Narragansett firm is playing a key role in exercises being conducted in Providence and at port cities across the nation to prepare for maritime terrorist attacks.

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Applied Science Associates Inc., a marine science consulting firm, has designed a software application for the Port Security Training and Exercise Program, a series of tests the U.S. Coast Guard and the federal Transportation Security Administration are conducted in 40 cities.

PortStep, as the program is called, is designed to help local port stakeholders prepare for, respond to, and recover from terrorist acts aimed at all modes of transportation within the port. The exercises began in the fall of 2005 and will continue until this fall. It is scheduled to come to Providence in September, said Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for the TSA.

The program, which has operated for three years, was created out of concern that a successful terrorist attack on a working port could halt container traffic worldwide for some time and significantly impact the U.S. economy and the entire world economy, she said.

“Obviously our nation’s ports are vital to the economic health of the country, and through these exercises we are able to test and evaluate how ready we are to deal with a threat to our ports,” Davis said. “It gives us a meaningful evaluation opportunity on issues such as preparedness, prevention and our ability to respond to a terrorist-related incident.”
Working with retired Coast Guard Captain Don Jensen, ASA has developed a software application used by PortStep administrators to design and evaluate the exercises. The Exercise Management System, known as XMS, has already been used for exercises at ports in New York City, Tampa and Pittsburgh, and will be used this summer and fall in New Orleans, Bridgeport, Conn., and Providence.

The XMS software includes tools for evaluating security plans at each port and defining the processes needed to keep ports functioning after terrorist incidents, said Chris Galagan, a senior project manager at ASA.
During the exercises, the software application is deployed on a wireless PC, enabling exercise evaluators to capture data on the run using a pen-based interface. Knowledge gained during each exercise is incorporated into improvement plans that are added to the system’s database for subsequent exercises.
A planning committee comprising law enforcement officials from the Coast Guard, TSA, FBI and other federal, state and local agencies and private stakeholders in the Port of Providence will soon begin designing the one-day exercise to identify objectives they want to achieve, and will then build a scenario from those objectives which will guide them during the exercise, Galagan said.

“That scenario usually has some terrorist incident that’s imminent or occurs, and the players in the exercise are expected to deal with whatever happens in the scenario,” he said.
Unlike mock emergency drills often conducted on land, PortStep is a table-top exercise in which all the action is purely theoretical, Galagan said.

“No equipment gets deployed, no Coast Guard cutters go out and drive around,” he explained. “You’re sitting around a large table and you discuss all of the issues, and each person or stakeholder gets up and says, ‘This is how we would deal with this particular terrorist threat or incident.’ ”

The results of the exercise will be documented in an “after-action” report that identifies the individual strengths and potential weaknesses of the port and provides a guideline for future exercises, Galagan said.