DRIVING THE INDUSTRY SINCE 1991 Security Front
TSA REPRESENTATIVE UPDATES INDUSTRY ON SCHOOL BUS THEFTS AND FIRST OBSERVER AND NEWHIGHWAY BASE PROGRAMS
William Arrington, general manager of
the Transportation Security Administra- tion’s Office of Highway and Motor Carrier, updated the NASDPTS Annual Confer- ence in Memphis, Tenn., in October on the effectiveness of the First Observer program. It trains school bus drivers and other trans- portation pros, along with representatives of other types of commercial fleets, on ob- serving, assessing and reporting suspicious activities on the road or at terminals. Ten, a month later, the program went on hiatus due to a lack of federal funding. First Observer closed shop until further
notice, confirmed Charles Hall, president of the company that administers the First Ob- server Program for TSA. As a result, Hall said all training classes and certifications are on hold, and the First Observer website was
taken offline Dec. 8. “TSA has assured us that the program will
be active again in the near future,” said Hall. First Observer has trained more than 58,000 transportation professionals in security domain awareness. Since June of last year, this has included more than 5,300 school bus operators. Of the more than 12,000 phone calls to First Observer report- ing suspicious activities, 432 have shown characteristics of possible terrorism plan- ning, added Hall. Additionally, 72 of those incidents directly involved school buses. Hall said that revisions to the First Ob-
server train-the-trainer program are still in the works to further enhance the effective- ness of the program once it returns. In the meantime, program calls can be directed to (877) 847-5510. Meanwhile, in Memphis, he
shared information on recent school bus thefts. “Tere is no current actionable intelli-
gence that would suggest that the pupil transportation industry is a target for a terrorist attack,” he said, adding that he remains concerned by some 20 school bus thefts nationwide since October 2011. “Tat causes me a lot of concern because of the untethered access that school buses tend to have and the amount of explosives a school bus could possibly carry,” he said. While the buses may have been stolen for their scrap metal, parts had yet to surface on the black market as of this writing. TSA also implemented a new Highway Baseline Assessment Security Enhancement (Highway BASE) program, which in October 2011 replaced the former Corporate Security Reviews (CSR). Arrington said 36 of the 100 largest school districts have already partici- pated in Highway BASE, and 14 of the 50 largest school bus contractors have also had Highway BASE assessments conducted. l
Read an interview with TSA's Arrington on the future of the First Observer program at
www.stnonline.com/home/web-exclusive.
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