by Zack Martin, Editor

More than 100 enrollment centers have been opened and 90,000 cards have been activated for the Transportation Worker Identification Credential. At some point this year ports also are supposed to start testing card and biometric readers for the TWIC, says Gena Alexa, identification solutions architect in the Federal Systems Group at Unisys Corp. Alexa made the comments during a session at the CTST Conference, May 13-15 in Orlando, Fla. Unisys has been contracted to handle the TWIC deployment at the Port of LA in California.

One of the main issues for port operators, especially container terminals, is that terminal operator personnel make up a small percentage of the actual people coming in and out of the facility, Alexa says. The rest of the people coming in and out are not directly known from day to day.

In the Los Angeles/Long Beach area there are approximately 20,000 longshoremen that serve both ports, she says. On a given day, a container terminal may need 200 or more longshoremen per shift. The 200 that arrive to work for each shift will come out of the 20,000 local longshoremen but the terminal doesn’t necessarily directly know them. The situation is similar for the thousands of truckers who deliver and pick up containers each day.