They look harmless enough. And, so far, they have been – just the same old shipping containers we’ve seen rumbling along our highways for decades. The one rattling by in the lane next to you could be loaded with anything from fruit to furniture.

Mark Laria dwells on the tiny chance that it carries the next 9/11.

Laria is port director at the Norfolk field office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In the 10 years he’s been here, roughly 10 million containers have come and gone.

None has been the dreaded “boom box” – the one security experts warn could be rigged with a terrorist bomb.

Even so, Laria said, the stakes are too high to blow off the risk:

“I don’t know if I’d be able to recover if some event happened – some 9/11 – and it was tracked back to a container that came through Hampton Roads.”

Radiation alarms wail regularly at APM Terminals in Portsmouth, sometimes dozens of times a day. They’re triggered as trucks – an average of 1,200 a day – head out of the bustling terminal hauling containers fresh off ships. A bank of detectors, installed after 9/11, guards the exit, scanning each passing semi for a hint of radiation.

“They’re sensitive,” said a customs officer manning the monitoring booth. “Four bananas in a lunch bag will set them off.”

Those innocent alerts are called NORMs, for Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials. Ceramics, tobacco, fertilizer, even kitty litter can emit enough radiation to grab the detectors’ attention.

NORMs are a nuisance. Each one must be checked out, sapping energy from the hunt for the real quarry: the dirty bomb.

Unlike nuclear bombs – which are too complicated for the typical terrorist arsenal – dirty bombs consist of two simple parts: an everyday explosive strapped to some type of radioactive material. Detonation shoots a fine dust into the air, where it’s dispersed by the wind to “dirty” a wider area.

Actual casualties might be few, since the fallout wouldn’t be nearly as toxic as a nuclear attack. Instead, dirty bombs are known as “weapons of mass disruption.” Panic is their mission – massive evacuations, flooded emergency rooms, expensive cleanups and a long-lasting fear of the unseen.

Laria, a career customs officer whose previous post was in Belgium, says the psychological impact would rock the economy, a well-known terrorist objective: “We’re still trying to recover from Sept. 11.”

Shipping containers have been fingered as a potential carrier, and the port makes us a major gateway. Perched on the edge of one of the world’s deepest natural harbors, Hampton Roads has evolved into the third-busiest container port on the East Coast.

One million containers flow through our terminals every year, a river of steel boxes fed by towering cranes and droves of longshoremen. It lays a path between our front door and more than 200 foreign lands.

The containers themselves have changed little since the first one was patented in the 1950s. Durable, reusable and designed to ride ship, road or rail, they revolutionized commerce. Goods that once traveled in labor-intensive bulk could now be “stuffed and sealed” – as it’s known in shipping lingo – by just about anyone in any corner of the planet, and transported in locked, easy-to-handle boxes.

Their dark recesses attracted smugglers. Narcotics, illegal guns, stolen cars, counterfeit goods, even stowaways have been concealed behind their creaky doors. After 9/11, Congress became concerned about more sinister secrets and set a goal to check for radiation inside every one of the 66,000
containers that reach America each day.

Since the attack, taxpayers and the port have spent $100 million to beef up security at Hampton Roads terminals. In 2002, our seaport became the first in the nation to install radiation monitors.

The technology isn’t fool-proof. Radiation can be masked, and conventional weapons – like the C-4 that blew a hole in the destroyer Cole in 2000 – won’t trip the detectors at all.

Manually searching each container is out of the question; more than half of all goods sold in the United States come from other countries.

“If we physically checked them all, commerce would grind to a halt,” Laria said. “We couldn’t hire enough people to do the job anyway, and even if we could, I don’t think taxpayers would want to foot that bill.”

Inside an anonymous warehouse in Chesapeake, specialists peer at their computers and thumb through thick volumes of import data, hoping to stop a boom box before it ever gets here.

This story doesn’t compromise security or reveal any “secret squirrel stuff,” as Lou Rossero put it. Rossero, a supervisor at Norfolk customs, set the boundaries for this article. Certain tactics and capabilities were off-limits, along with the exact address of the warehouse. Photos were OK’d, but most officers didn’t want their full names used in the newspaper.

“Makes it too easy to Google them,” Rossero explained. “Then ‘The Godfather’ kind of stuff could start happening.”

The agency is paid to be paranoid. Sept. 11, 2001, was a game-changer. Before then, goods were its main focus. In the shake-up that followed, people and plants were added to its list, and protecting the homeland from terrorists became its No. 1 priority.

The attack prompted Rossero to step into a uniform and strap on a .40-caliber handgun. He was living in New York then, working in sales: “I had customers in the World Trade Center. I wanted to contribute after that.”

He won’t say how many customs officers now work in Hampton Roads, only that their ranks have tripled since 9/11.

The scope of operations inside the warehouse is part of the new era.

On one side of the building, in a large, quiet room full of desks, officers try to target suspicious containers while they’re still thousands of miles away. Manifests are electronically transmitted to the targeting unit from across the globe – one for every container bound for Hampton Roads. The forms must arrive 24 hours before the box leaves its foreign dock to allow time to scrutinize the shipment.

Established importers can streamline container clearance by enrolling in a program that certifies their supply chains as secure. Others are run through a computer that uses more than 500 variables to calculate the risk level – including the importer’s profile, cargo and the reputation of the country of origin.

If a box is determined to be a “terrorist threat,” it’s slapped with a “don’t load” order. The less risky but still fishy are flagged for inspection when they arrive. Random checks occur as well, “to keep the honest people honest,” Laria said.

Around 10 percent of containers get that personal look. Officers working the wharves can cut locks and climb inside, or line up boxes in a staging area, where they’re surveyed by a nearly $2 million X-ray machine, a Transformer-like vehicle that creeps along the row, piercing the steel walls without a touch.

Containers suspected of concealing contraband – the core of customs work – are hauled to the warehouse for a thorough shakedown. Shippers are charged $600 for a “full-strip” and the box doesn’t leave the warehouse until its bill is paid.

The fee goes to the contractor who runs that side of the warehouse, known as the CES, or Centralized Examination Station. Its 18 bays hum with activity as laborers unload and reload containers – both inbound and outbound – guided by officers and agricultural specialists probing for everything from drugs to bugs.

At one bay, an ag specialist pokes through sacks of kidney beans from China, looking for beetle eggs smaller than a mustard seed. Nearby, an officer hunts under the hood of a car, a popular spot to hide stacks of illegal cash.

Others check for heisted vehicles behind the yawning doors of an export container. Enough hot cars are seized in Hampton Roads to put the port on the nation’s top-10 list for recovered vehicles.

Many are luxury types: Lexus, Audi, BMW. Laria explained that they wind up here because the port’s major shipping lines ply routes to the Middle East, western Africa and the former Soviet bloc countries, where demand is strong for high-end rides.

“As long as someone is willing to pay for it,” he said, “someone else is going to try to get it to them.”

Street drugs are usually headed into the country. In the rear of the warehouse, officers use a portable X-ray machine to scan spools of thread from Romania; ecstasy pills have been tucked inside similar spools in the past.

Hollowed-out logs, rolls of newsprint, stereo speakers – they’ve all yielded stashes. Duffel bags slipped into a container last year held 121 pounds of cocaine. Paint cans have harbored handguns.

“Smugglers are very ingenious,” Laria said. “It’s hard to keep up with the lengths they’ll go to.”

Seizures must be advertised to give owners a chance to claim the property. The rule results in curious notices in the local classifieds: “Seized on 9/13/2011: DESCRIPTION: $48,760.00 U.S. Currency…”

The bad guys, Rossero said, never show up to collect.

What’s the plan if a “boom box” ever is detected in Hampton Roads?

It would be isolated on the docks and the area around it secured. Then, Laria said: “A lot of people would get ‘spun up.’ ”

In the future, there will be even more boxes to watch. Container traffic is expected to mushroom when the Panama Canal is widened in 2014, allowing the super ships that now stick to the West Coast to come our way.

Customs is working on a plan that could help. The Container Security Initiative would move screening offshore. Dozens of foreign ports are already cooperating, scanning boxes for radiation before they’re loaded onto U.S.-bound vessels.

Detection is also improving. Scanners are being refined, better able to distinguish natural radiation from the kind intended to terrorize.

“We have to be right every time,” Laria said. “They only have to be right once.”

Joanne Kimberlin, 757-446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com