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Dennis Treece and Massport: Safe Harbor

From Boston's Logan Airport to the city's waterfront shipping facilities, Massport CSO Dennis Treece patrols an anxious perimeter.

By Lew McCreary

Page 3

So, despite the ostensible fear factor in the challenges that face him at Massport, does Treece also see himself as being fortunate?

"I do. It's one of the reasons I took this job," he says. "It was the [right] time to come here. There's a window of opportunity, post-9/11, where security in the transportation sector is on the top of the pile. So this is a great time to come into a CSO position. Of course, it's incumbent on me to make good use of that [opportunity] and not overuse the position that security now has within the organization."

At Massport, security "is the avowed top priority," Treece says. "Given 9/11, and given the fact that if you don't have the faith of the traveling public, you don't have a traveling publicsecurity is job one."

It has to be. Little things are always happening. On the day CSO spoke with Treece, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employee was caught, incomprehensibly, bringing a loaded handgun to work at Logan. The gun was detected in the employee's coat during a routine screening to which all workers are subjected when they show up for each shift. The spin on the incident was, naturally, that the system works. Less than a week later, a United Airlines flight from Boston to San Francisco was delayed when a passenger found a box cutter in a seat pocket in the first-class compartment. The passenger reported it to a flight attendant and the plane was immediately emptied and searched, and the passengers rescreened, before the aircraft was reboarded and allowed to depart. No explanation for the presence of the box cutter was found before the plane finally pushed back, but later it was learned that an airline maintenance worker in Denver was the source (raising questions about a possible gap in airport security involving ground personnel).

Treece believes that the traveling public is prepared to endure a reasonable level of inconvenience in exchange for greater confidence in the travel experience. But how much will travelers be willing to put up with before convenience and service degrade unacceptably? In other words, as in every other security context, how much is enough versus too much? Andalso as in every other security contextmitigation of the impact of security measures on productivity (or, in this case, the customer experience) is paramount.

He offers the example of Logan's new $146 million, federally mandated baggage-screening system (see "Carrying a Lot of Baggage," Page 31). "Because of the way Logan is laid out, we had no lobby space in which to put these [new X-ray] machines. And we did not want the traveling public to have an impact from 100 percent baggage screening. So everything is in the basement; everything's inline," he says. "It still takes four to five minutes for your bag to get from check-in to the plane. And this includes going through the [X-ray] machine. There's a little bit of extra time if the machine can't clear a bag and the TSA has to physically get into it. But we're not experiencing any late push-backs, and no bags are missing their flights because of this added security. There's plenty of time within the traditional window of arriving an hour before your flight in order to make that happen."