Security at Sea-Tac: Why you're still at risk

Nearly two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the creation of a multibillion-dollar federal agency for airport security, travelers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport are still at risk.

At a time air travel is the heaviest since the attacks, Sea-Tac's security system relies on overworked employees at understaffed checkpoints, according to documents and interviews with 45 local screeners and supervisors for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Though the country's airport security is vastly improved since the Sept. 11 attacks, some parts of Sea-Tac's system falter during peak travel times.

• Screeners say that too often, passengers bypass security and luggage is inadequately screened for explosives.

• Screeners admit taking shortcuts with baggage searches during busy times so that flights aren't delayed.

• Supervisors do not always follow procedures — outlined in the TSA's classified "Screening Checkpoint" manual — such as how to screen shoes or monitor passengers after they set off metal detectors.

• The turnover rate for Sea-Tac screeners is 9.5 percent, compared with the national 5 to 6 percent rate. High turnover reduces the number of experienced screeners.

Screeners, federal employees who make $26,378 a year to start, blame turnover on inexperienced managers, unclear supervision and last-minute mandatory overtime.

The Times interviewed 45 TSA screeners, supervisors and an administrator. Nearly all asked not to be identified, saying they were afraid they would be fired. Accounts of specific incidents were not used unless two or more persons independently verified them.

"I am so amazed that something else hasn't happened," one Sea-Tac screener said, referring to the Sept. 11 hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash in Pennsylvania. "If another plane goes down, there will be hell to pay."

Bob Blunk, TSA's federal security director at Sea-Tac, said the airport has good security and he encourages screeners and supervisors to use their own judgment. "The people here are working real hard," Blunk said. "It's a tough job."

Staffing

The lines form in early light. On a recent August morning, the first of the airport's average 52,000 daily passengers slowly snaked through labyrinths of flat, blue cord to reach one of 36 security lanes spread among five concourses.

Ideally, a worker greets them there, reminds them to empty pockets and helps load bags onto a conveyor belt that passes through the X-ray machine. If something suspicious is spotted, the screener must get a replacement to staff the machine and then check the bag.

Meanwhile, passengers walk through a door-frame-shape metal detector called a magnetometer. If it sounds the alarm, another TSA employee must scan the passenger with a wand that detects metal objects. If no one with a wand is available, the passenger is told to wait in a cordoned-off corral until someone arrives.

At the same time, the screener at the magnetometer should continue screening passengers while watching the corralled traveler in case he or she passes something to another person.

"It's always something innocent, like a ticket," one screener said. "But you never know. It could be a gun."

The federal screeners often find banned items, from brass knuckles to guns, and have been finding more such items than the private screeners of a year ago. Still, screeners worry they could easily miss a terrorist intent on getting by the system.

Monitoring the corral while screening is difficult. At some checkpoints, the corral is behind the magnetometer or views are blocked.

"Sure, you could do both," said one screener. "If you had eyes in the back of your head."

Federal guidelines call for at least four screeners to operate each lane, and those standards are usually followed. But more than a dozen screeners and supervisors said lanes regularly operate with three, sometimes two, screeners.

"Is safety compromised by that? Yeah," said Karl Schmidt, a passenger screener for nine months until he resigned in frustration in June.

Experts said understaffing can harm security.

Aviation expert Isaac Yeffet, former security director for El Al, Israel's national airline, said understaffing leads to longer lines and creates incentives for workers to take shortcuts.

"The difference between four and three is significant," said Brian Jenkins, a security expert at RAND, a nonprofit think tank. "You're increasing each person's workload by a third in what is a high-volume processing that requires a lot of close attention."

Blunk said checkpoints have been staffed by fewer than four people only occasionally, usually when screeners take breaks or when they open lanes to handle peak-hour crowds. He said he is trying to add workers to Sea-Tac's 629 passenger screeners and 403 baggage screeners. He has hired dozens of part-timers, who start this fall.

But Sea-Tac director Gina Marie Lindsey is lobbying the TSA and Congress for at least 1,200 total screeners. Meanwhile, to stay within its budget, TSA is cutting 6,000 screeners nationwide.

Sea-Tac is the nation's 16th-busiest airport, but it ranks ninth in passengers per screener.

After staffing problems during the busy Fourth of July holiday pushed lines into the parking lot, the Port tried to help by hiring workers to direct passengers to security checkpoints. These workers were supposed to free up TSA screeners so more lanes could be opened.

Lindsey said she trusts the TSA to adequately staff the lanes it opens. But the Port's pressure on TSA to open more lanes has an unintended side effect. Often TSA opens more lanes without having four screeners for each lane.

Two workers said they had seen supervisors quickly station screeners at empty lanes to make the lanes appear open when Port inspectors came by to count the staffed lanes.

At a staff meeting this month, TSA managers told screeners they would start enforcing the federal four-screener standard.

"They announced the new policy on a Friday," said a screener. "That next Monday, I was on a team of three people."

Breaches

Understaffing also makes it easier for screeners to lose track of passengers.

On July 14, a family walked through an unattended D concourse magnetometer and headed toward the gates. Within minutes, someone discovered the unstaffed lane. A police report states only: "Alarm activated; passengers walking through unmanned mag for approx 5 min; tsa determined that no breach occurred."

Airport spokesman Bob Parker said he discussed with TSA staff members whether to declare a breach, which meant the concourse would be shut down and passengers rescreened. Since the family was found quickly and seemed harmless, TSA supervisors chose not to.

Screeners nearby said the lane was unstaffed for five to 10 minutes, and more passengers may have gotten through. The screeners worry that such incidents happen too often. Once unscreened passengers get out of sight of the checkpoint, they could hide or hand off a weapon or explosive.

"If somebody gets through without being checked, you need to dump the entire terminal and recheck everyone," said a screener.

Several screeners said they witnessed several checkpoint transgressions this year and ended up chasing passengers.

Other than the July 14 incident, Sea-Tac police have no records of these incidents. "Are we always told of these questionable instances?" said Port director Lindsey. "I don't know."

Blunk thinks such incidents should be addressed case by case and do not always require closing the concourse and rescreening.

"If that's his answer," security expert Yeffet said, "I don't want to fly from his airport."

Baggage

On a recent morning, a level below the ticket counters, luggage whirled around a conveyer belt. Nearby, Cate, a German shepherd, and her handler, a Port of Seattle police officer, worked their way past stacked suitcases in a huge baggage cart.

Cate sniffed each bag and then waited until more stacks of bags were loaded aboard. When she detects an explosive, she sits and is rewarded with a treat. Planted explosives are part of a protocol to keep her motivated.

Bomb-sniffing dogs are fast and effective, but they can work only three 20-minute shifts a day before giving out. Time spent with the dogs is expensive. The Port has spent more than $100,000 in overtime and other costs since January.

Typically, TSA uses four other methods to screen checked bags:

• It puts bags through the minivan-size explosives-detection system (EDS) machine.

• It swabs the inside or outside of luggage and then puts the swabs into a small explosives-trace-detection machine.

• It searches luggage by hand.

• It does "baggage matching," a controversial practice in which screeners match bar codes on boarding passes to the coded tags affixed to travelers' checked bags. If a passenger fails to board a flight after checking in a suitcase, airline workers unload it from the plane.

Many people believe all bags are checked for explosives by hand or electronically. Indeed, President Bush said in February that TSA was "screening all checked luggage at our airports."

For now, since Sea-Tac and other airports do not have enough EDS machines, baggage matching counts as screening.

Although screeners use this method on only a fraction of checked baggage, they and others complain it does little to deter suicide bombers.

"We'd obviously prefer that every bag be checked electronically," said an official of a major airline that uses Sea-Tac. "Bag matching is the lowest-quality checking there is. ... The fact is that the infrastructure just doesn't exist to check every bag."

Furthermore, several screeners said bag matching at Sea-Tac is used in a predictable way that, if revealed, might make it easier for a terrorist to exploit. For that reason, The Times is not detailing this practice.

During busy times, some baggage screeners said they cut corners. Procedures call for them to open a percentage of bags and swab inside to detect explosives. When hundreds of bags stack up, they ignore the protocol and just swab the outside of bags, several screeners said.

"(With) so many bags piling up, a lot of the time we just don't do it," a screener said.

Management

Earlier this summer, screeners at D concourse checkpoint thought they might have a breach. While supervisors investigated, the staff linked arms and formed a wall to keep passengers from leaving the checkpoint.

"It was beautifully done," said a screener filling in nearby. "But I wouldn't have known what to do because I haven't been trained."

Screeners said many supervisors at Sea-Tac are inexperienced, do not adhere to the TSA's standards and rarely train them in new procedures.

One reason may be that TSA doesn't prepare supervisors for the demanding job. "To become a supervisor, there is no formal training at all," said Charles Lingle, who worked as a TSA supervisor before quitting in late July to find a more stable position.

Many employees were hired in a rush as the new $6.5 billion agency started from scratch, installing federal employees in place of the private contractors who previously provided security at the nation's airports.

Screeners at Sea-Tac complained of regularly being forced to work overtime, often with little notice. "I've never worked anywhere where the morale was this low in my entire life," said a 47-year-old screener. "It's prison."

Greg Fox, an organizer for the American Federation of Government Employees union, has listened to complaints from TSA workers nationwide.

"If I had a list of one through 50, Sea-Tac would be at the top of the list with the poorest morale," Fox said.

Experts such as Yeffet say demoralized workers aren't as conscientious, which hurts security. Even so, TSA's Blunk and airport officials said frontline screeners are doing well under difficult conditions. "We don't have any complaint with the screeners," said Parker, the airport spokesman. "We think they're doing a great job."

Blunk agreed that supervisors need more training and plans to provide it.

Another problem screeners noted: Supervisors fail to follow guidelines, even with simple tasks.

"The shoe policy changes checkpoint to checkpoint, shift to shift and lane to lane," said a screener.

"We were trained to touch the shoe with the wand," said another screener who said she followed that practice. "Then a supervisor comes and reams me out, in front of a passenger, and threatens to write me up because she says I was wanding wrong."

For a time, TSA managers announced changes in procedures at meetings at the start of each shift. But during busy months, some teams meet only once a week, while others rarely meet.

One screener said she learned of new procedures by reading newspaper accounts.

Confusion over procedure leaves some screeners to make up their own rules as they go along, another screener said. "When the managers come down and give us a new order, we decide we can do better by just ignoring them and making up our own minds on how to do it."

Blunk said opinions about procedures may differ and he encourages discussion to improve screening practices.

RAND security expert Jenkins said TSA should spend money applying the best practices of security and traffic-flow systems, using as models everything from Israeli airports to supermarkets.

Instead, he said, TSA seems to handle airport screening much like ancient Rome treated its transportation workers, saying simply, "Row faster."

"If you're a galley slave chained to an oar, I guess it works," Jenkins said. "But if you're a screener charged with a power that is extremely important, then it just may well be that we have to say, 'We don't have enough people.' "

Cheryl Phillips: 206-464-2411 or cphillips@seattletimes.com

Chris Maag: 206-464-8450 or cmaag@seattletimes.com

Jimi Lott: 206 464-8139 or jlott@seattletimes.com

Staff reporters Ian Ith and Michael Ko contributed to this report.