On December 16, 2009 when the HAZMAT Conference, attended by the Director General of Shipping and other shipping luminaries, ended in Mumbai, everyone was talking about the importance and focus needed in the carriage of hazardous goods by sea and the transformation in the rules of carriage from the days of Captain Charles Bryant till today.  But who was Capt Bryant – and what did he do? 

Capt Charles Bryant was the master of a brig ‘Elizabeth Watts which was scheduled to sail out of Philadelphia Port with a full consignment of hazardous cargo. What he never realized was that no one was willing to become a part of his crew. His ship, built at Maine Shipbuilding Yard, USA was of 224 tonnes, built of Lebanese cedar, christened ‘Elizabeth Watts’, and was a veritable ‘floating bomb’. It was loaded with 901 wooden barrels of crude oil and 428 barrels of kerosene oil. Any spark caused by a negligent seaman stealing away a quick smoke would have blown the ship into smithereens. Finally, on the night of December 18,1861, he went pub crawling outside Philadelphia docks. Befriending sailors and offering umpteen rounds of free beer and whiskey at the pubs he rounded up his ‘drunken’ team and led them to his ship where all fell flat on the decks in total stupor. Casting off the ropes during the night, the Elizabeth Watts slipped out of the docks in the cold darkness and headed towards London. When the bewildered sailors got up the next morning, they had become a part of his crew. The ship reached London and berthed at Victoria Docks on Jan 9, 1862 where it took another 12 days to unload the ship. The voyage ended safely.

Today ship-owners are unwilling to allocate more than 5% of their deadweight tonnage to hazardous cargo. Hence restrictions on various classes are the norm of the day. Box ship owners refuse to accept cargoes of IMDG (International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code) Class 1, 5.1, 6.1 and 7 on their ships. Not only that, charter parties have a clause that restrict loading more than 500 tonnes of IMDG cargoes. Further, under the new IMDG regulations shore personnel booking and controlling hazardous cargoes would require to undergo an approved HAZMAT course.



But what are ‘hazardous goods’? By common law, there is no definition for the hazardous goods. Goods can be hazardous either because they are inherently dangerous, like explosives, or because they have a propensity to become hazardous when faced with extraneous circumstances. But to put matters at rest, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has defined and classified all hazardous goods in a code referred to as the IMDG Code and put them into nine classes. This has assisted in regulating their stowage on ships and transportation. 



Today the onus of declaring hazardous cargoes is on the shipper. So, if a contract of carriage expressly prohibits the shipment of dangerous goods, it is a breach of the contract to tender such goods for shipment.  So, even if a cargo is known to be potentially hazardous but has a special characteristic which makes it more than ‘normally hazardous’, the shipper or charterer also has a duty to notify the carrier about it. So, in practice, the importance of understanding the liability with respect to hazardous cargo is huge and the earlier the shippers and others realize this, it will be better for the sea transportation industry.

Capt Gautama,  GM, Sea Consortium Shipping India, is perhaps the most qualified shipping executive in India. The string of qualifications to his credit are: MA(AU), MA(BU), M Sc, LLB (Bom), LLM (Bom), Dip TD, DEM, FIISA, FICA, FNMIS, FIII, MIMarTech., MIMA., etc. He is also a faculty with many management institutes.