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Hapag-Lloyd Registers Big Increase in Incorrectly Declared Dangerous Goods

[ February 10, 2016   //   ]

Hapag-Lloyd registered considerably more incorrectly declared dangerous goods last year, compared to 2014. The Watchdog program developed jointly by Hapag-Lloyd’s IT and dangerous goods experts – a special safety software that continuously checks cargo data to identify anything conspicuous identified 4,314 incorrectly declared dangerous goods cases last year. This is an increase of 65% on the previous year’s figure of 2,620 cases.
Hapag-Lloyd’s dangerous goods experts looked into more than 236,000 suspicious cases picked up by the safety software in 2015 (2014: more than 162,000) – that’s equivalent to an increase of approximately 46%. Dangerous goods that are declared imprecisely, incorrectly or not at all have the potential to pose a major risk to crews, ships, other cargo and the environment.
For Ken Rohlmann, head of the dangerous goods department at Hapag-Lloyd, attributes this sharp increase to two reasons: a big increase in the volume of cargo shipped by Hapag-Lloyd last year due to the company’s merger with CSAV’s container business, and a sharp rise in Watchdog findings following the devastating dangerous goods explosion in the port of Tianjin in mid-August.
“Many ports drastically tightened their dangerous goods guidelines in the wake of the incident or even prohibited dangerous goods from being processed at all,” Rohlmann said.
Hapag-Lloyd’s Watchdog, which is considered to be a leading software in the shipping industry has been subject to a lot of interest from customs and port authorities, police, as well, as from other shipping companies.

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