Divers from the Tanzania port authority inspecting a hull during a UNODC training.
Maritime threats cannot always be seen from the surface. Criminals are exploiting the vastness of the ocean, the extreme environments at sea and other inherent challenges of ensuring security underwater to traffic illicit goods and plan attacks on critical infrastructure.
To effectively counter these threats, port officials need to be ready to carry out underwater inspections of port structures and vessels, which is why UNODC has been training divers in the Tanzania Ports Authority on Open Circuit Scuba Diving and hull inspections.
Criminals, including terrorists, can threaten legitimate trade by conducting underwater sabotage to underwater sea cables, port infrastructure or ships, threatening the global economy and public safety.
The world’s economy relies on this infrastructure. Without ports, the 90 per cent of global trade shipped in containers would not be moved. And without the world’s network of underwater sea cables, the trillions of dollars in transactions that take place through the world’s network of underwater sea cables would not flow.
The threat is made worse in ports like Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which has very low underwater visibility due to sediment inflow from the river, which discharges directly into the harbor.
By now, many are familiar with the more “traditional” ways drugs get smuggled. They may picture fentanyl pills hidden under a false bottom of a car trunk, bricks of cocaine stowed within the walls of a container or tonnes of marijuana tucked into a crate of fruit on a ship.
But organized drug trafficking groups are consistently innovating to escape detection by law enforcement, with some police suspecting an increase in the “parasite” method.
When the parasite method first appeared in the 1980s, traffickers would fill metal cylinders or boxes with drugs and attach it to the hull of a vessel.
More recently, however, traffickers have invented new techniques to evade detection, by placing the drugs inside sea chests, i.e., recesses in the ship’s hull that allow controlled water intake. Others hang the drugs from boats using steel ropes hooked to rings welded to the vessel’s hull.
As noted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) Global Cocaine Report, “Some of the parasites are even equipped with air chambers to float and compressor valves to inject water and submerge the box to evade underwater inspections.”
Highly skilled divers are hired by the suppliers, receivers or both to install or retrieve the parasite before the vessel enters the port.
Countering such smuggling operations would be difficult anywhere. But the low visibility in ports like Dar es Salaam’s makes it necessary to conduct all hull inspections – particularly around sea chests, gratings, thrusters, rudder assemblies and possible attachment points for unauthorized objects – almost entirely by touch. This significantly increases inspection time, diver workload and the risk of missing well-concealed devices or modifications.
For these reasons, UNODC’s training, which built off a previous diving course, included equipment configuration and care, dive planning and gas/time management, buoyancy control, underwater navigation, buddy procedures, controlled emergency responses and disciplined post-dive reporting.
These skills will enable the divers to conduct port support operations such as underwater inspections of port structures and vessel hull areas, basic underwater search patterns and safe recovery principles.
“I was able to verify the shortcomings and improvements in emergency response and underwater rescue procedures, along with a clearer understanding of surface intervals and waiting times for flying or ascending to altitudes in vehicles after a dive,” noted one participant.
Another noted that the training “changed the way we see our work... After learning diver safety tags, communications procedures, and clear authorization before entering the water, we feel more professional and much safer when working around ships in the port.”
Participants have now headed to Brazil, where they will take part in a Hull Inspection Diving course to learn from Brazilian Federal Police instructors and UNODC experts. The course is focusing on advanced hull-search techniques, detection of concealed contraband (including parasite-type devices), structured underwater inspection procedures and operational coordination with port authorities and vessel crews.
These trainings were made possible thanks to the generous support of the Government of Japan.
