The Greater Lafourche Port Commission's facility plays a strategic role in providing 16 to 18 percent of U.S. oil and gas needs and forms part of a Gulf of Mexico hydrocarbon infrastructure that furnishes the country with 30 percent of its domestic oil supply.

Because this "small" port is nonetheless a very important one, it serves as an object lesson in how news coverage and editorial commentary often miss the mark when port security is the target.

Recently, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general issued a report that criticized its port security grant program, which, since 2002, has distributed $565 million to more than 1,200 projects to beef up security in a sector whose traditional pre-Sept. 11 concerns were stowaways, pilferage and narcotics smuggling.

The report said that, in its initial stages at least, the grant program spent $67 million for 258 proposed port security projects that an internal review board had said were "marginal" to key security needs and were given out despite "dubious" scores on key criteria issued by the project's own evaluators.

In addition, it said, the program "did not have the benefit of national key asset and critical infrastructure protection information now being developed" by homeland security, meaning that key program stakeholders at the department "did not collaborate to integrate the program with broader national security initiatives."

The report was a potential bombshell, if only for the fact that $150 million more is to be distributed by the Department of Homeland Security in the next few weeks. (In response, the department has tightened up both the requirements and the process by which the grants are made.)

From the time the report was first reported in Port Security News , as far as press attention was concerned, it was: "Katy, bar the door."

The Los Angeles Times, whose readership encompasses two enormous seaports – Los Angeles and Long Beach – through which 40 percent of the nation's cargo move, offered an argument echoed in newspapers around the nation: "The Department of Homeland Security is supposed to protect the nation's ports against terrorist attacks. So far, it has excelled instead at securing pork."

The Times and others lampooned the fact that, while the nation's largest and busiest ports – such as Los Angeles/Long Beach, Houston and New York/New Jersey – received grants, so, too, did those of St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands, and Martha's Vineyard, in Massachusetts. The latter, The Times thundered, "Do not exactly make up the trade backbone of the American economy."

While true to a degree, the focus on "large" vs. "small" ports was both facile and misleading for a variety of reasons. Since 9-11, seaports and many inland water facilities are obligated by law to upgrade their security.

And, as the case of Port Fourchon shows, "small" ports can also be critical to the economy.

Observes Ted M. Falgout, executive director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission: "Every citizen of this country should think of us when they turn on their lights or get into their car.

"Without a port security grant, we would have not installed a camera surveillance system and added another harbor patrol vessel."

Smaller ports are neither risk-free nor necessarily less desirable terrorist targets. Some of the bigger, more visible mega-ports may be higher priority targets, but smaller ports should not be overlooked because they are links in our chain of homeland defense that should be neither weakened nor broken.

The argument that only larger ports need funding obscures a far more pressing reality – that the federal port security money still remains woefully inadequate to do the job.

Martin Edwin Andersen is the former managing editor of Port Security News. His e-mail address is martinedwineandersen@yahoo. com.