Any one overweight or badly loaded container can have a huge impact on others once loaded onto a large ship. The potential for a disaster is a very real one and it can also be attributed to issues on land such as trucking accidents and overweight cargo falling through the bottom of containers.
Weight or loading discrepancies might explain why around 10,000 boxes are washed overboard every year, according to official statistics given by ICHCA. The issue of misdeclared goods, violations involving dangerous cargoes, poor or incorrect packing and wrongly declared container masses can each lead to erratic centers of gravity of ships, which can cause instability or negative stability, which could eventually lead to a vessel capsizing.
In order to address safety problems at sea and on shore arising from container shipments that have incorrect weight declarations, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted amendments to the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention, Chapter VI Regulation 2 – Cargo information regarding a mandatory container gross weight verification.
The SOLAS amendments were adopted in November 2014 and will enter into force on the 1st of July 2016. The intervening period should be considered to be the transition or planning period. Thus, all regulated parties need to be prepared to implement and abide by the container weight verification requirements by 1 July 2016. This period should also allow time for regulated parties to prepare for required process and documentation changes and to test information transmission enhancements in advance of the effective date.
The effect of these requirements on containerized supply chains is that the verification of the gross weight of a packed export container will be required before the container is loaded aboard a ship. To ensure compliance with the SOLAS amendments, participants within the supply chain (especially shippers, carriers, way bridges and terminal operators) will need to establish and implement processes to ensure that the verified container weights are provided to the necessary parties in a timely fashion and are used by the terminal operator and vessel operator in the vessel’s container stowage plan.
The purpose of the SOLAS amendments is to protect vessels, cargo and the environment and to obtain an accurate gross weight of packed containers that are moved through the supply chain prior to loading aboard the ship. The responsibility for obtaining and documenting the verified gross weight of a packed container lies with the shipper.
Under the new regulations, boxes will have to be weighed and verified before loading. However, it is still unclear where this can realistically be carried out in the Supply Chain as once loaded on a truck or lifted by a quay crane it would effectively be too late, thus the problem of overweight shipping containers could continue for a number of years, despite a recent vote in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to amend its Safety of Life at Sea (Solas) Convention, which would see the production of a verified weight certificate before a container is loaded onto a ship.
It is also pointed out that the new regulations only cover one aspect of the problems in working with containers and would do very little when it comes to improving safety standards within the shipping industry as a whole.
Are we prepared today, to follow the processes of the regulation? In the present context, with regards to the regulation, there is still a lot of processes to be put into place to be able to successfully implement this regulation (For eg: way stations- adequate no. of way bridges are approved by the admin of each country however the weighing standards are not regularized and tolerance levels with reference to container weight - the allowable container gross mass differs from country to country.) There needs to be proper co-ordination between all the countries so as to come to a common ground to address the above issue.
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