How saving a buck can lead to death, destruction – or don’t people care?

WHEN writing about a topic that makes me angry, I tend to bash the keys on my laptop.

Did a shipping agent – my fingers are really hammering the keyboard now – not declare the contents of a container as dangerous goods (as required by international regulations) and did that lead to a fire aboard a container ship?

That is allegedly what happened on board the APL Austria near Port Elizabeth last month.

Either a serious mistake or a deliberate act to avoid a higher freight rate per container may have led to the dangerous chemical cargo (suspected to be calcium hypochlorite) being misdeclared.

Ignorant of the nature of the cargo, the ship planners would have treated the container as carrying benign merchandise and planned the stowage accordingly.

Sub-tropical heat may have caused the chemical shipment to catch fire with devastating effect. Other adjacent containers caught alight, adding to the conflagration.

While specialist international fire experts are still investigating the incident, calcium hypochlorite has been blamed for several recent serious fires, leading to shipping lines imposing strict precautions surrounding its carriage, or refusing to carry the product.

Investigations suggest that most calcium hypochlorite fires have been caused by misdeclaration of the cargo, or by incorrect stowage that runs against the strict requirements of the International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code.

This was certainly the case in the explosion and subsequent fire aboard the container ship Sea Elegance off Durban some years ago. The findings of that investigation were revealing.

Carrying calcium hypochlorite, the offending container was stowed in the bottom of a hold next to the engine-room bulkhead. The hold was unventilated, and during the passage from China in a feeder ship, its transfer to Sea Elegance in Singapore (where the temperature seldom drops below 28ºC) and the tropical transit to Durban, the high temperatures caused the chemical to become unstable. While the ship was anchored off Durban in October 2003, the unstable chemical exploded, the fire spread and the ship was fortunate to survive such a serious incident.

Had Sea Elegance been further out to sea, it could easily have been gutted and more crew members could have died.

Now all this could have been avoided if the shipper had declared the contents of the container as dangerous goods, in which case, it would have been stowed according to the appropriate regulations, and certainly not next to the engine-room bulkhead where temperatures soar in the tropics.

Instead, it was more expedient – and probably much cheaper in terms of freight rates – to pass off the contents as general cargo.

That folly in the case of Sea Elegance caused damage costing millions to repair, let alone the costly delay to the ship and the delivery of cargo.

APL Austria has suffered similar damage, and general average has been declared, meaning considerable inconvenience and cost to all whose cargo is aboard the ship.

In both these incidents, SA Maritime Safety Authority officials, the port authorities and tug crews acted superbly, saving the ships from certain destruction.

But what makes me hit the keys so hard is that callous shippers lie blatantly about the content of their containers, caring naught that seamen can die a horrid, fiery death.

But somewhere in a remote archipelago, or in a city block, a mother, wife and children weep, and weep and weep, for their man will not come home.

And all because someone wanted to save a quick buck.