New safety drive proposes pooling of industry info

In Europe the two shipping lines MSC and Maersk Line are spearheading a new cargo safety drive in the shipping industry, aimed at reducing the number of accidents caused by hazardous cargoes, overweight, poorly stowed containers and the like. A main tactic being headlined by the two shipping companies is that information on dangerous practices and incidents should be shared across the industry. Therefore, the goal of the ‘cargo incident notification system network’ (Cinsnet) is to gather, collate and share all information related to potentially dangerous containerised freight on an industry-wide basis. That would enable container lines to receive a rapid alert in the case of a particularly worrying incident, and for carriers to have a clearer idea of how widespread certain bad practices or possibly risky situations are across the industry. But it’s not necessarily a new strategy in this country, according to Glenn Delve, marketing director of MSC in the line’s SA head office in Durban. “We recognised the problems of poorly stowed and overweight cargoes, and of carrying dangerous goods, and have been conducting our own safety drive on such problems for about the last four years,” he told FTW. “We have already seen it as a matter of educating the market to identify and correct any high risk practices in cargo loading.” But, if the educating process fails to overcome the problem with certain agents, then persistent offenders face the imposition of penalty charges, Delve added. Tackling the overweight problem, for example, the line first of all has to identify whether a box is actually overloaded. Matching the declared weight on the container transport order (CTO) with that on the bill of lading (against which the tonnage freight rate is calculated, and likely to be where a lower weight would be declared) is a good indicator of an overweight misdeclaration, according to Delve. “It’s quite a process,” he said, “but we have found it a successful test procedure. “In such cases we have a penalty system for overloading, and we have also found this to be an effective deterrent.”