You could live in the Boston area for years and have no clue that South Boston’s Conley Container Terminal exists. That’s somewhat remarkable, given both the scale of the work that goes on inside and how incredibly noisy the place is.
“This is the MSC Judith,” says Lisa Wieland, Massport’s port director, gesturing at a gargantuan cargo ship that was berthed and unloading. “It’s bringing cargo from the Mediterranean to the U.S. east coast.”
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“We bring in a lot of furniture, a lot of wine and beer, distilled spirits, seafood,” Wieland adds. “We’ll put containers on the ship that are carrying waste paper, scrap metal, and also seafood... We probably have a thousand boxes that are going on and coming off the ship today.”
To the layperson, the ships that use Boston Harbor right now are spectacular: huge freighters like the MSC Judith that carry up to 9,000 shipping containers, each one with a capacity of 1,300 cubic feet. (“Boxes” doesn’t quite do them justice.) But Boston Harbor’s limited depth means those ships can only dock at certain times. What’s more, the even larger ships that have become common since the expansions of the Panama and Suez canals, and carry up to 13,000 containers, can’t visit Boston at all.
Now that’s about to change, thanks to an overhaul that’s been in the works for years and was recently backed by the Trump Administration.
“We just received federal funding to move our Boston Harbor dredging project forward, which is really exciting,” Wieland says. “When they deepen the harbor, what it’s going to do is enable larger ships...to get here more efficiently and effectively.”
The harbor’s depth will go from 40 feet now to 47 feet when work is completed — even deeper, in the outer harbor. As you’d expect, it’s a really big job; if the material that’s going to be dredged up were piled onto a football field, it would stretch a mile into the sky. But Scott Acone, who’s overseeing the project for the Army Corps of Engineers, says that technically speaking, the task is fairly straightforward.
“You bring in a large floating platform, usually a barge or a ship, that’s got a crane mounted to it,” Acone explains. “It’s a crane with a clam shell bucket. ... Scoop by scoop they go down, they dig up the material.”
That material will then be shipped to a site 20 miles out in Massachusetts bay, where it might provide an unexpected benefit.
“There are some drum fields and other industrial waste that was disposed of there,” Acone says. “And so we’re working with the [Environmental Protection Agency] to see whether or not we should use that material to cap that...so the environment’s no longer exposed.”
Also slated for an expansion: Conley Terminal itself, which is getting a second berth, and bigger cranes that can accommodate those larger ships.
In tandem, Wieland says, improvements to the harbor and the terminal should double the number of containers that can be shipped via Conley every year. That increase should mean more blue-collar jobs in a city that’s increasingly white collar. And according to Wieland, the benefits go beyond the Boston area.
“This terminal is really important for connecting New England to the global economy,” she says. “At the end of the day, we’re New England’s only full-service container terminal. And so there’s a lot of business here in New England, and a lot of businesses that rely on this facility to import and export their goods.”
The Conservation Law Foundation, whose 1983 lawsuit spurred the harbor’s lengthy clean-up, thinks that dredging can be done without serious environmental consequences. In fact, CLF says, by reducing harmful emissions, more visits from newer, bigger ships could actually have a positive environmental impact.
The dredging project is slated to start next year, and will take about four years to complete.
