If a container catches fire here, it has the highest possible chance of starting a massive blaze. Fire needs fuel, and container lines have perfected the art of squeezing as much of it as possible into one place. The fire spreads to the neighbouring containers, and temperatures in the stack rise to hellish levels and spread outwards.
Such blazes often go undetected in their early stages. But once started, they can resist the efforts of firefighters for days, write off entire ships and, most grievously by far, claim the lives of entire crews.
In late June, a high-powered meeting will be held between representatives of hull underwriters, P&I clubs and container lines, discussing what can be done about what is rapidly becoming an epidemic. For them, it’s make-or- break. “Representatives from more than 80 percent of world container capacity will be there,” said a source at one of the major P&I clubs. “That meeting will address how the rules on dangerous goods will apply on container ships.”
“Everybody is very animated on this topic,” the source added, “and it’s not just the claims committees within the P&I clubs - it goes right up to the top, to the International Group of P&I Clubs. If it’s just a small claim the P&I clubs can pay it themselves. But if it’s a massive claim, such as a major pollution claim, then they club together, and it’s the International Group’s reinsurance that pays out.”
Indeed, the bill for the Maersk Honam fire in March, which killed five crewmen, is believed to have exceeded $100 million already, putting it at the international level, in a case that will take years to solve.
“We’re only talking a few hundred dollars per box, but non-declaration puts the whole ship at risk,” the P&I source continued. “There’s a huge incentive to get to grips with this. At the moment the pressure is on carriers to exercise better due diligence with regard to the contents of containers. However, the world’s logistics chain is now so efficient that checking boxes in any number is not physically possible without causing huge disruption.”
A Costly Con: Non-Declaration and Misdeclaration
Some shipping lines have responded with an ultimatum: They will simply refuse to carry calcium hypochlorite. But one need only glance at the history of Prohibition to see how that will turn out. It will do nothing to discourage those already lying about the contents of their boxes from continuing to do so, argued Standard P&I Club’s Loss Prevention Director, Yves Vandenborn, at a recent conference.
“We see a lot of the major container lines simply refusing to carry it – that doesn’t help,” he said. “Industries need calcium hypochlorite, so by banning it more shippers will simply mis-declare it and try and get it on board anyway. In fact, if you do declare calcium hypochlorite it is a perfectly safe cargo to carry. The problem comes when you don’t know you are carrying it.”
Another complicating factor is alliances and consortiums. If a shipowner has refused to carry hazardous cargo but his consortium partner hasn’t, he might well end up carrying that cargo anyway. The industry has also seen situations where consortium members have suffered because their partners are less diligent about verifying container contents.
It should be noted that there is much more than enough pressure on ship crews already without also requiring them to be firefighters. Yet if a fire is detected, that is precisely what they must become.
The terrifying proposition to combat a box fire low down in the container stack involves wading through smoke – which, as seen in the KMTC Hong Kong case, could very likely be toxic – to approach a container that, depending on its contents, might explode at any moment. Then the crew must drill, tap or otherwise puncture a hole in its white-hot surface in order to ram a water-mist nozzle into it.
On land, as horrifying as the incident at Laem Chabang was, there is at least somewhere for crew members and others to escape to and almost always a possibility of medical treatment. But at sea the situation is more dire by far. There will be little prospect of help if a vessel is in a remote location. Firefighting vessels are small and generally limited to coastal waters. The only options are to fight the blaze raging across the ship or abandon it.
48 | The Report • March 2020 • Issue 91
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