Page 12 - Customs Today Winter1984-OCR

The Pacific Region
/>] ferome Hollander ^*^^ By Jerome Hollander
The nPeawclyifiecstaRbeligsihoend, Counsetomofs Rtheegiotnwso, combines most of what was formerly the
San Francisco and Los Angeles Regions.
Geographically, it includes the states of Washington, Oregon, California, Ne
vada, Alaska and Hawaii.
By most credible Customs workload statistics, the Pacific Region ranks number two nationwide, following New York. Collections ran about $2.5 billion last year, and a significant percentage of the national drug seizures were made on the West Coast.
With some 2,450 employees, the
Region touches both the Canadian and the Mexican borders, the entire West
Coast of the United States, the vast and remote state of Alaska and the tropical island-state of Hawaii, a gateway for
Southeast and Southwest Asian heroin.
It is a Region of extremes. It is a
Region of all seasons.
The Anchorage District, with 63
employees, covers the state of Alaska. 10
The district has more coastline than all other districts in the United States com bined. With 33,900 miles of waterfront, Alaska has 50% of ths U.S. coastline. The job announcement for an inspector at Alcan includes a fact sheet which reads like the Surgeon General's warning on a pack of cigarettes. It says the nearest grocery store is 43 miles away and the closest bank is 93 miles. Shopping facilities are in Fairbanks, 300 miles away. Medical aid is but 93 miles; the hospital is 250. School requires a 100-mile round trip—there is no busing. Radio and television reception is very poor.
In winter, the temperature runs down to 60 degrees below zero. Summer time and the temperature can be in the 80's. There will be 22 hours of light a day in the summer and 4 hours of light in the
winter. Inspectors from Anchorage are flown to Dutch Harbor, a distance of some 700 miles, to inspect vessels coming into Alaska to pick up various cargoes.
7 he Lynden, Wash., Customhouse on the U.S.-Canadian border is far from Pacific Region
Headquarters in Los Angeles. Twenty miles east of
Blaine, Washington, it is located in a town which has a yearly tulip festival.
The $3,000-roundtrip airfare is paid for
by the vessel owners.
Clyde Kellay, Jr., Anchorage Dis trict Director, explained the function of
Customs at Dutch Harbor this way:
"Every government wants to control ac cess to its territory. They want some
presence, some reflection of their
sovereignty. Customs performs that mis sion. We are the Government of the
United States to the Russians and the
Japanese and to other nations whose vessels enter our waters."
At Anchorage International Air
port, a baffling and unsolvable dilemma: peaks and lulls in the work flow. One minute, during a Saturday morning, there is almost no activity. One inspector is clearing a private aircraft coming from