That means when it came to installing a secure access control system to the areas the technology had to be simple, non-invasive and easy for people to interact with every day. The choice was vascular scan technology and today there are 50 scanners installed at IT and utility rooms and at all high security environments around the port’s cruise facility. Vascular pattern-recognition technology takes a picture of how the veins are laid out in the back of a person’s hand. It reads the biometric from a card, and then asks the person for their hand, and matches their hand to what is stored on the card.

“My main focus was to get it into our control centre first,” says Melanie Costley, Senior Manager Security  Operations and Security with the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority. “I wanted to make sure anyone going in there was authorized and I know the only way to do that was to use some sort of biometric with the cards we have.”
The port worked on the project, which was completed last September, with PBA Consulting Engineers of Victoria, B.C., along with SimplexGrinnell out of Delta, B.C., who installed the vascular scanners from Toronto-based Identica Canada Corp. Getting the technology to work perfectly involved trial and error, says Costley.

“It was a slow process — mainly because there was some learning things for the installers. We have a highly secure IT network they had never come across before,” she says.

They also learned that the readers all must be installed at exactly the same height.

“If you’re putting your hand in the scanner and you’re putting your hand in low versus higher up it might be catching you at a different spot. We put them in, but needed some modifications done. On some of our doors we already had card readers and there may have been a switch there and they tried to put the scanners in to accommodate everything else and that was a big mistake — they all have to be at the same height,” she explained.

The installation of the vascular scans cost $260,000, of which the Marine Security Contribution Program (MSCP) covered 75 per cent.

The MSCP was announced May 7, 2004, and was a three-year,  $115-million commitment from Transport Canada to assist ports and marine facilities with security enhancements. It provided 75 per cent funding to each approved project. The fund was created to offset the costs associated with rapid regulatory change in the marine community, pro- vide an incentive for facility owners/ operators to address evolving marine security requirements, contribute to the maintenance of a consistent security standard and reduce the likelihood of a marine transportation security incident. The funding was also created to maintain the competitiveness of Canada’s marine transportation sector.