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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.

Along those lines, Treece thinks about the airport of the future. Notwithstanding an ambitious and expensive upgrade that Logan is in fact still undergoing, the whiteboard in Treece's office has a sketch of some big ideas for a safer, more efficient air travel environment.

The sketch shows graduated transitions from purely public (and less secure) spaces and structures leading inward to those that are stringently controlled and sequestered. High dirt embankments rise between roadways and would deflect the force of a car bomb. Drop-off and pickup is envisioned occurring at the ends of long tunnels leading into and out of the terminals. The terminals themselves would be fortified by embankments and buried under green space on the other side of which "you wouldn't even hear" a bomb blast. Treece is enthusiastic about the need to bring architecture and security together.

"Man, I could take you over to terminal E and show you a beautiful building. I mean, it's breathtaking. But there's just one thing wrong with itit's made out of glass," he says as he shakes his head. "Glass!" Like political patronage, the vestige of a more innocent age.Life on the EdgeThere is a beach at the edge of Logan Airport. On some level, the very existence of that totally open and unprotected beach just galls Treece. It makes him envision bad guys in wet suits coming out of the waterthe kinds of people against whom, as he puts it, you would just want to "open up a can of whuppass."

That has led Massport to make a self-interested alliance with the clam diggers who eagerly work the fertile flats adjacent to Logan's runways. For 14 months the clammers were banned. "When 9/11 happened," says Treece, "everybody shut all the 'gates.' And one of those gates was the beach."

The problem was that Massport didn't know much about the clammers because, before, it had never seemed important to know. But post-9/11, says Treece, "all things that were unknown were questionable, and all things that were questionable were stopped." That greatly displeased the clam diggers, whose livelihood was disrupted, and who waited out a solution that, in essence, turned them into vendors like any others who service the airport. "The vendors all have to have fingerprint-based criminal history background checks. And they have to be badged and be a known quantity," he says.

So the clammers have now gone through that process. In addition to being licensed by the state's fishery department, they are official known entities at Logan. They have badges, wear special vests and are regularly checked on by security guards. In addition, they are extra eyes and ears at the edge of the airport property.