It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

The Boston Sunday Globe featured an unusually graphic – and lengthy – editorial about the need to upgrade Boston Harbor.

The particulars:

Dredge Boston Harbor

Advent of much larger cargo vessels means city’s venerable port will have to adapt

 

 

THREE TIMES a week, large container ships dock at South Boston’s Conley Terminal. Enormous cranes and some 1,000 workers work in tandem to offload the cargo — mostly alcoholic beverages, frozen seafood, and furniture — from Asia and across the Atlantic. In about 30 minutes, the goods are loaded onto trucks headed for points throughout New England. The ships are then reloaded — this time, with animal skins, paper, scrap metal, and more frozen seafood — before continuing on to their next port of call. The process is at once complex and orderly.

Yet the shipping industry is undergoing dramatic changes amid relentless pressure to transport more cargo faster; today in Boston, it takes half as long to unload a cargo container from a ship and discharge it via truck as it did just eight years ago. But how long Boston’s port will remain competitive amid even farther-reaching changes is an open question.

There are lots of other fun facts to know and tell in the piece.

Check ’em out.