Container Lines Urged to Catch Dangerous Cargo Risk at Booking Stage

The container shipping industry needs to move fire prevention much further upstream, identifying dangerous cargo risks at the booking stage rather than discovering them after a box has been loaded aboard, according to a report from Thetius and Tigris Systems.

The study examines why dangerous goods incidents remain stubbornly difficult to prevent despite established international regulations, and argues that compliance alone is no longer sufficient to manage the cargo safely.

The scale of the problem gives the argument its weight. There were 250 vessel fires in 2024, up 20 percent year on year and the highest number in a decade, while TT Club estimates that a major containership fire occurs roughly every 60 days.

The core issue identified is not an absence of information. Declarations, safety data sheets and subsequent corrections often sit in different emails, PDFs and operational systems, leaving carriers, terminals and vessels working from incomplete or outdated versions of the same document set.

That fragmentation is what makes the failure mode persistent. The data needed to identify a misdeclared or incompatible cargo frequently exists somewhere in the chain, but not in a form that any single party can act on before the box is stowed.

The proposed remedy is aggressive digital screening at booking. Dangerous goods declarations, safety data sheets and supporting documents would be automatically compared for conflicting UN numbers, classifications, packaging and quantities, with systems also extracting operational information such as temperature limits, segregation requirements and firefighting instructions.

The timing distinction matters operationally. A risk identified at booking can be refused, reclassified or restowed at negligible cost. The same risk identified after loading requires either a discharge and reload or acceptance of the cargo as stowed, and once a vessel has sailed the options reduce to firefighting.