by Sabrina Salas Matanane

Guam - The tides of change continue to roll through the Port Authority of Guam. The agency broke ground on another multi-million dollar project, the latest shores up safety and protection.

Port board member Mike Benito said, "We need to be prepared to make sure that our security is top notch here and that the port is not vulnerable and we also need to be able to react quickly and I think that this is what this new facility will help us do."

Over the next several months Maeda Pacific will build a new fully secured operations center building as part of the Port Security Enhancements Project. The $3 million project is funded from a combination of grants from Homeland Security, FEMA and the Maritime Administration. Lieutenant Governor Ray Tenorio said, "These are good things because and they're good things for the people of Guam because we need to be able to handle the manmade and the natural calamities that are happening especially given the fact that we have so much tensions with North Korea."

The project will interface a closed-circuit TV surveillance system and an access control/secured credentialing and TWIC reader system through a state of the art command and control integration platform. Together these capabilities will enhance the port's ability to mitigate, prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from both minor emergencies to major disasters.

Port Authority general manager Joanne Brown says this is an incredible step forward, saying, "Here we are all these years later and how e need to take the Port to the next level the ability to have the surveillance the ability to monitor the ability at any time to be able to track what's happening at this facility visually, have that command center in times of natural disaster. And as our Lt Governor mentioned sometimes man made situations and where we are now there's an awful lot that we need to be concerned with. To have that ability at the Port, it's not just limited to Civil Defense and Homeland Security we're going to be partner in that process."

The maritime port security operations center is scheduled to be completed by January, but Maeda Pacific is pushing to get it done by the end of this year.