OTTAWA: Sitting inside a large-scale imaging machine at Deltaport, a Canada Border Services agent carefully examines the computer screen in front of her.
The cargo is billed as barrels of mango pulp inside a shipping container that has just arrived on a foreign vessel.
She zooms in and moves the image around to check the consistency in each stack of barrels. And she examines the walls and floor of the container itself in her search for contraband.
Seeing nothing amiss, she radios the all clear, allowing the container to be trucked away.
The process takes less than two minutes.
This machine led to the discovery of 109 kilograms of cocaine concealed inside the roof of a container, Mike Hryciuk tells a Vancouver Sun team on a recent tour of Deltaport — a terminal at the Roberts Bank superport next to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal.
Hryciuk, the CBSA’s chief of waterfront operations, enthusiastically describes the unique setup at Deltaport, which provides the CBSA with permanent space for its operations.
“It’s hugely beneficial because Deltaport is the largest container terminal port in Canada. We are able to keep our large-scale imaging equipment here. We have dedicated exam space for conducting the imagining, conducting exams,” he says.
CBSA also has a downtown Vancouver office where teams with responsibility for other port properties are based. They move the region’s second imaging machine around the port as needed.
More than 1.5 million containers arrive at four terminals within Port Metro Vancouver every year and the CBSA examines only 50,000 of them — less than four per cent.
Exams can include the large X-ray-like imaging machine, a full “de-stuff” of the container at the container examination facility in Burnaby or a “tailgate exam, which is opening the doors and having a look at the load, maybe climbing the load,” Hryciuk explains.
“We also conduct export exams for goods and commodities leaving Canada.”
While the number checked seems small, Hryciuk says, “we examine 100 per cent of the high-risk containers.”
Local CBSA officers acquire intelligence about every vessel destined for Port Metro Vancouver from the National Targeting Centre in Ottawa.
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