APM to Use TWIC as Credential For Workers at Virginia Facility

By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter

This story appears in the Jan. 5 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

APM Terminals Virginia will discontinue use of company identification cards at its Portsmouth, Va., facility and rely solely on the federal Transportation Workers Identification Credential, or TWIC, a port executive said.

Beginning April 15, when the TWIC mandate goes into effect, workers at APM ports, including more than 2,000 truck drivers “must use [their] TWIC against the reader to gain access,” said Ron Babski, general manager of safety, security and the environment at  APM Terminals’ Portsmouth site.

The TWIC mandate requires that any worker needing unescorted access to any U.S. port carry a federally issued identification card that contains biometric data.

TWIC cards are scanned at port entry points and eventually will be capable of electronically verifying, via fingerprints, whether the holder of the card is the individual to whom the card was issued.

Babski worried that the TWIC rollout would disrupt APM’s operations, since employees would have to deal with two separate ID cards.

As a result “we worked hard to integrate the TWIC directly into our system,” meaning that workers will only have to carry the federal TWIC card to access APM’s Portsmouth facility, Babski said.

Several months ago, APM sat down with its technology vendor and began electronically adding TWIC-relevant information to its internal security databases.

The process will enable the TWIC card to function just like APM’s old company-issued access cards. Truck drivers servicing the port will be able to scan their TWIC badges at entry points, exactly as they do now with their current credentials, Babski said.

When reached by Transport Topics in late December, Babski estimated that APM had electronically entered TWIC data for about two-thirds of the Portsmouth workers who will require it. Of those workers, about 2,000 are truck drivers. Babski said APM had entered TWIC data into its system for about 55% of the truck drivers servicing the facility.

While it takes only about three minutes to add the information contained on each worker’s TWIC card to APM’s database, Babski acknowledged that the process has “been a mountain to climb. This is brand new and took a lot of work to properly format the system to recognize the TWIC.”