30 Years Ago

A LOOK BACK AT MARCH 1988

The March 1988 issue of HCB was something of a potpourri of less frequently covered ground for the magazine. The (rather arty) front cover image signalled a feature on the transport of dangerous goods by air, while elsewhere we flagged up items on waste transport and express parcel services.

And while it did not relate to waste transport, our opening article looked at another issue with waste – the practice of dumping wastes at sea. At the time we said such a practice was “under fire” from the environmental lobby; today we can barely imagine that it was ever allowed. We reported that 2.1m tonnes of liquid industrial wastes, 1.6m tonnes of solid industrial waste and 5.0m tonnes of sewage sludge were being dumped into the North Sea alone every year, much of it emanating from the UK. All of this was to be prohibited as from the start of 1989 – unless there were no shore facilities to take the waste.

It is also nice to be reminded that all the work towards reducing discharges at sea was being done by the Scientific Group on Dumping.

In a similar vein, we reported in 1988 that Waste Management Inc, the largest waste disposal company in the US, had abandoned a six-year campaign to get permission to incinerate waste aboard specially designed ships off the US coast. That it intended to incinerate a range of toxic products, including dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls, perhaps added to its difficulties in securing permission.

Sometimes, though, it is the smaller items in the back copies that make the most interesting reading. We reported thirty years ago, for example, that BP Shipping had sold its stake in Stolt-Nielsen and that the Norwegian tanker owner’s plans for a stock listing in New York had had to be pulled in the face of ‘Black Monday’ in October 1987.

And Pakhoed had reached agreement with US-based Tenneco to buy Gebr Broere, operator of two small tank terminals in Rotterdam and a fleet of tank barges and coastal tankers. That deal increased profits at Pakhoed – owner of the Paktank International tank storage network – by around 33 per cent, profits that had already been boosted by the sale of its Pandair airfreight forwarding arm. It was perhaps the Broere acquisition more than anything that gave Pakhoed the financial muscle to arrange, some years later, a merger deal with its compatriot chemical logistics specialist Van Ommeren to form Vopak and – once the parties had figures out that it would make more sense to spin off their chemical distribution activities – Univar.

The March 1988 issue also featured some interesting follow-up information on historical incidents. Particularly distressing was the case of the freighter Cason, which suffered a fire in the stern not long after leaving Antwerp for Hong Kong with a mixed cargo that included thousands of drums of dangerous goods. Many of the crew abandoned ship, fearing that the fire would spread, but most of them drowned. The vessel ran aground near Cape Finisterre, Spain, leaving salvor Smit Tak with a difficult job in bad weather, made worse by a series of explosions in the holds. The salvage operation was ongoing at the time and “likely to take several more weeks”. Let’s hope the salvage award was worth the risk.