Mandatory container weighting plans scaled up

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has confirmed that proposed changes to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) will be considered by the Maritime Safety Committee which meets later this month, paving the way for the mandatory weighing of containers before they are loaded aboard ship. “If approved, they would be considered for adoption at the next meeting in November this year,” IMO’s head of public information services, Lee Adamson, told FTW last week. “The draft amendments would add new paragraphs to SOLAS regulation VI/2 Cargo information to require the shipper of a container to verify the gross mass of container, and to ensure that the verified gross mass is stated in the shipping document,” said Adamson. “The packed container should not be loaded onto the ship if the verified gross mass has not been provided or obtained.” In terms of practical implementation, the gross mass of containers will need to be verified by either weighing the packed container using calibrated and certified equipment or by weighing all packages and cargo items and adding the tare mass (mass of an empty container) to the sum of the single masses, Adamson said. “The general consensus is that it’s a good thing to prevent overweight containers from being loaded aboard ship and exceeding stack weights, but as far as how it will be implemented, there have been no meetings in terms of the weighbridge as yet,” CEO of the SA Association of Ship Operators and Agents (Saasoa), Peter Besnard, told FTW. “They’re trying to get the weighbridge going again at Bayhead road but whether this is going to be done from the packing stations isn’t certain. At the moment no weighing takes place – they just take the shipper’s word for it,” he said. “The terminals used to have weighbridges when entry was limited to Transnet’s own transport fleet, but when they opened the gates they couldn’t operate on the likes of Superlinks so they stopped weighing containers.” While there have been some mishaps, the majority of packing stations are reputable, in Besnard’s view. FTW understands that the new rules will hopefully be adopted in November this year so that they can come into force before May 2016. Delays following implementation could be a problem, according to managing director of DAL Agency, Ron Frick. “The weighing would need to be done by the ports, which is likely to cause delays. The port gantries have a weighing mechanism in the crane and that would be the simplest way of doing it. But it would have to be done at the last minute before the container is loaded on board – and in the case of a discrepancy the container would need to be discharged again.” Frick says misdeclaration has been less of a problem in recent years, possibly due to greater vigilance on the roads – as most containerised cargo moves into port by road. “The biggest problems are encountered during the reefer season when vessels are under pressure, utilising every last capacity tonne – but at present ships are not loaded to the gunnels because of the European economic situation. The container exports to Asia would be more problematic as many of the containers are loaded with minerals and unless these are weighed at the packing station they could easily exceed the recommended safety weight limits of the container,” said Frick. “Overloaded containers could cause serious injury or even fatalities to everyone handling the container between place of load and place of final discharge. The onus is on the exporters to ensure the weight safety limits of the equipment are not exceeded.” From a marine cargo insurance point of view, misdeclaration is only an issue if a loss is directly related to the misdeclaration, chief operating officer of Associated Marine, Dave Keeling, told FTW. “If it’s a misdeclaration on a shipping document and if, for example, as a result a 5t crane is used to move a 15t load because the document said it was 5 tons, then the cause of the loss would be related to the misdeclaration. If the insured was privy to the misdeclaration then the successful prosecution of any claim could well be prejudiced,” he explained. “But if the misdeclaration had nothing to do with the loss then it wouldn’t have any meaningful impact on policy coverage. The enormity of container misdeclaration is best demonstrated by the MSC Napoli, which ran aground in the English Channel in January 2007. A container audit of the vessel revealed huge discrepancies between the declared weight and the actual weight of the boxes. The audit points out that almost all the containers loaded below decks had been submerged below water due to internal flooding within the holds and their weights therefore differed significantly from the declared weights listed on the cargo manifests due to water absorption. However, about 660 containers stowed on deck, which had remained dry, were also weighed and the weights of 137 (20%) of these containers were more than 3 tonnes different from their declared weights. CAPTION A container audit of the MSC Napoli, which ran aground in 2007, revealed huge discrepancies between the declared weight and the actual weight of the boxes. Photo: French Ministry of Defence INSER & CAPTION The weighing would need to be done by the ports, which is likely to cause delays. – Ron Frick