What is the Cause of a Cargo Damage?

The container revolution of the 1960s was deemed to be the solution to limiting cargo damage, but has experience proved otherwise?

A considerable proportion of the Insurers time is taken up handling container cargo claims where 25% of the damage is physical, 14% temperature related, 11% containers lost overboard, 9% theft and 8% shortage.*

It is worrying that one of the biggest contributory causes of container cargo damage is bad stowage – causing nearly 20% of the claims. It would seem that we have merely shifted the cargo damage problem further back up the transit chain.

Shore error now accounts for around 27% of large container cargo claims compared with 19% for all types of cargo claim, tie this in with bad stowage statistics and it seems to point to problems originating at the time of stuffing.

We seem to have substituted problems in one large container (the ship) to problems in a lot of smaller containers (the container). With around 12,000,000 containers in circulation and 95,000,000 loaded container movements each year, this seems to be a real problem for the industry.

Although it is a major cause of container cargo damage, it would be wrong to lay the origin of all container cargo claims on bad stowage alone. Listed below are many other reasons for damage:

■ Lack of export packaging.
■ Increased use of weak retail packaging.
■ Inadequate ventilation.
■ Wrong choice of container.
■ Poor condition of container.
■ Lack of effective container interchange inspection.
■ Ineffective sealing arrangements.
■ Lack of clear carriage instructions.
■ Ineffective internal cleaning.
■ Contaminated floors (taint).
■ Wrong temperature settings.
■ Condensation.
■ Overloading.
■ Poor distribution of cargo weight.
■ Wrong air flow settings.
■ Wrongly declared cargo.
■ B/L temperature notations misleading/unachievable.
■ Lack of reefer points.
■ Organized crime.
■ Heavy containers stowed on light.
■ Stack weights exceeded.
■ Heat sensitive cargoes stowed on/adjacent to heated bunker tanks or in direct sunlight.
■ Fragile cargoes stowed in areas of high motion.
■ Damaged, worn, mixed securing equipment.
■ Poor monitoring of temperatures.
■ Wrong use of temperature controls.

As an insurer finding and highlighting the problems and where the money goes is easy. rectifying those problems unfortunately is not.