Category: Shipping/ Mail Safety

From “Ground Shipments Undergo Limited Security Checks”
Associated Press (03/20/18) Koenig, David. Posted by ASIS.

Packages intended to be placed on a truck, like the bomb that exploded Tuesday at a FedEx facility in Texas, are not screened as carefully as items carried by passenger planes. Delivery companies such as FedEx and UPS rely on a risk-based strategy, hoping to detect illegal or dangerous shipments by spotting something unusual about the package or the shipper. Screening every parcel intended for domestic delivery would be too expensive. Cargo on passenger planes must be screened, usually by computed-tomography scanners, said Jeffrey Price, an aviation-security expert at Metropolitan State University in Denver. However, if a package is going to be placed on a truck for delivery within the United States, as with the device that exploded on a conveyer belt at a FedEx facility in Schertz, Texas, “there is much less likelihood that it’s going to be physically screened with X-ray or even a person examining the package,” said John Cohen, a former counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security. For truck shipments, cargo carriers train employees to look for suspicious behavior, including anything that looks odd about the package. An employee at a FedEx center in Austin, Bryan Jaimes, 19, told reporters he never received new guidance from managers about handling packages. He said his job is to load the trucks and that he assumes other workers earlier in the shipping chain give packages a once-over before they get to him.