Letter from the editor

EDITOR’S LETTER

I have a confession to make. Don’t tell anyone, but every month I have a sense of dread when the new issue of HCB arrives back from the printers. Too often – at least in my mind – I spot a mistake I should have picked up on the last set of proofs. Sometimes it’s my error (spelling mistakes in headlines are the worst) but as I’m responsible for everything that goes out under the HCB name, any mistake is down to me.

So you could imagine the Schadenfreude (there is an English word for it, ‘epicaricacy’, but no one I know ever uses it, or even knows how to pronounce it) I felt when going through the report of the last meeting of the UN Sub-committee of Experts. China had put in a paper wondering why the Excepted Quantity limit for UN 3208 (metallic substance, water-reactive, nos) was shown as ‘E0’ when the other five generic entries for waterreactive substances (all Division 4.3, packing group II) have ‘E2’. China thought this might be a mistake, not least since the ICAO Technical Instructions have ‘E2’ against UN 3208.

ICAO chipped in at this point, noting that UN 3209 (metallic substance, water-reactive, self-heating, nos) had ‘E2’ when it should be ‘E0’. It reckoned there had been a typing error when the Excepted Quantity codes were added and UN 3208 and 3209 were given each other’s values. The Sub-committee agreed this was an error, which was easy enough to put right. As a result, the correct values will be shown in the 22nd revised edition of the UN Model Regulations, due for publication later in the year.

So far, so good. However, it does mean that the current modal regulations, which are based on the 21st revised edition, have got the wrong numbers. ICAO may have spotted the error and corrected it, but my copy of ADR 2021 certainly has the wrong information and other rulebooks may well do too. Will the respective regulatory authorities issue corrigenda? Or will shippers looking to take advantage of the Excepted Quantity relief for UN 3208 have to go through an approval process?

Putting my editor’s hat on, I know only too well that mistakes can be costly. Publishing material carries responsibilities, not least the risk of libel. But publishing incorrect information can also raise liabilities – which is why pretty much any technical or market publication includes a disclaimer, which readers can in HCB’s case find at the bottom of the Contents page. What it says, in effect is that if you, as the reader, make a commercial decision on the basis of information in HCB and it goes wrong, it’s not our fault.

Here at HCB we do take a great deal of effort to ensure that what we write is correct before it gets published, though as I noted above, it’s not always possible to get everything 100 per cent right all the time.

Having flicked through the opening pages of ADR, I don’t see any such disclaimer. Does that mean, therefore, that shippers that have had to spend extra cash due to the erroneous absence of an Excepted Quantity provision for UN 3208 have a potential case for compensation? I suspect that would be a difficult case to pursue in the courts and I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that. We are all human, even regulators.