BOW WAVE 234

Marine Claims Edition

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

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Wavy Line	sam@wavyline.com
(c)2004 WavyLine.com	Issue No 234 17 May 04
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Tracing Previous Cargo
3. Quarterpoints: Digital Images
4. Containerisable Bulk Cargo
5. The Future of the AAA
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch. for lunch.

(Orson Welles)

New Readers this week include:

Jeremy Harwood of New York Lawyers Healy & Baillie George Philip of ISS in Abu Dhabi
Linda.Peacock of ING in London
Adam Rolland of Osborn-Lange
Michael Xanthakis
Simon Mccormickof Summit Global Partners in San Francisco Angela Ramirez
Readers in Thakkar & Co in India.

News of Readers

Mr Michael Harvey, was elected Chairman and Mr Nigel Rogers Vice-Chairman at the Association of Average Adjusters at the meeting of Fellows on Wednesday 12MAY04.

Captain Russ Garbutt has recently retired from P&O Ferries sea-going employment. However is still very much involved in maritime affairs ashore

David Martowski has now retired from Thomas Miller

Gary C. Bhojwani, President of the Lincoln General Insurance Company is leaving to take up the position of President of Fireman’s Fund’s Commercial Business Division in San Francisco.

This week's issue has rather a lot to do with marine claims. Our circulation has risen this week to 9800 individual addresses. We are always pleased to welcome new Readers.

Enjoy.

2. Tracing Previous Cargo

Pat Gardiner, a very early correspondent of Bow Wave, has sent in a story from the farmers weekly here in Britain about which he expresses some scepticism. Pat was in the agency and haulage business in Felixstowe but nowadays writes and enthuses about the ideas of self-sufficiency from his smallholding in East Anglia. He was caught up in the Foot and Mouth Epidemic by reason of keeping pigs and came up against officialdom in various unpleasant guises. He is a good writer--very trenchent-- and anything he turns his hand to is well worth reading:-

Here is the item from the Farmers Weekly website:-

Reject route for ring rot spuds Source: FWi 12 May 2004 By Tom Allen-Stevens

THE SEED potatoes believed to have brought ring rot to the UK travelled an 11,000-mile round trip to the tropics before they were shipped to the UK, the government has revealed. They were rejected in Honduras, resorted and rebagged before being sent to Welsh seed potato grower John Morgan, according to a Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report.

The seed, imported into the UK in April 2003, was first shipped to Honduras in Sept 2002, according to Appendix six of DEFRA's Final Potato Ring Rot Report.

The document details how the seed was rejected there due to soil contamination. The temperature in the containers rose as the seed arrived in the tropics, so much of the seed had sprouted by the time it arrived back in Holland.

Here the stock was unpacked, sorted and rebagged before 2.2 tonnes of the original 34t consignment was shipped to the UK.

It was the daughter crop of this lot of the Provento variety that was found to have ring rot in November 2003.

But by this time the ware crops from other lots that were shipped to Portugal, Iraq, Honduras and the Ukraine, had been consumed.

Despite extensive testing by UK and Dutch authorities of all seed traced to the batch and the farm in Holland that supplied the seed, the source of the disease has still not been found.

But the authorities cannot follow up any possible link with the container that carried the seed because there is no record of prior loads. The seed that arrived in the UK was given no more than the routine test for ring rot.

Our Keep British Crops Healthy campaign page has more information on the plight of growers battling notifiable pests or diseases.

There are also links to find out more about existing outbreaks and those that could be just round the corner.

http://www.fwi.co.uk/article.asp?con=14646&sec=2&hier=66

To which Pat says:-

I do not believe it...and that is an expert opinion. You may quote me, anywhere, anytime.

" But the authorities cannot follow up any possible link with the container that carried the seed because there is no record of prior loads."

Utter rubbish. Fit only for dissemination by bent civil servants to gullible agricultural journalists.

All sea containers are carefully tracked throughout the world, the ship-owner and competent authorities will know the previous cargo, consignor and consignee.

I was actually the Nedlloyd agent at Felixstowe loading containerships for this very area - and had an Honduran student living with us and working in my office.

If anyone wants to take the matter further, I will be very glad to assist them at no cost.

See his website at:-

http://www.go-self-sufficient.com

3. Quarterpoints: Digital Images

Your editor's recent Quarterpoints column in Lloyd's List pondered how images now pass around the world like a force of nature:-

Digital Images

These past weeks have seen the newspapers and television filled with images of Iraqi prisoners being abused by their captors and wardens via pictures presumably taken by the very same individuals as some kind of keepsake. Images taken in wars and their aftermath have long been a feature of the modern era. Families often saw pictures of war taken privately by someone involved at the time which opened a window onto the uncivil ways of war. I remember as a child being shown a bleary black and white photograph taken by a British soldier of a German convoy in Belgium which had been strafed from the air and reduced to useless scrap.

But today there is a difference in the velocity of circulation as digitalised images flow around the world in a rapid and ceaseless stream on the internet. No more do these unoffical trophies and records rest largely unseen in cigar box sized collections. The chances that any single event will be photographed and turned into an image capable of being attached to an e-mail are nowadays high. You can even see it in the tight lipped world of insurance and loss adjustment. Large claims and casualties which once upon a time were photographed for very limited circulation between the parties concerned are nowadays liable to be seen by a much larger audience. I remember a decade ago you might see a collage of loss images on the office wall of a P&I Club Correspondent which tended to illustrate the many parables of safe and unsafe shipping practices.

A newer version of that kind of thing is the website operated by the LA based air cargo attornies Countryman and McDaniel. Their Cargo Law Site has a gallery of losses which is regularly updated by anonymous correspondents, often very soon after the incident or casualty has happened. It was on this pioneering site that I first saw the nature of the of losses which had occurred on the "APL China", a not very reassuring sight for those who have reservations about the very large container stows of the modern era. The spectacular fireworks explosion on board the "Hanjin Pennsylvania" is there as is a very full account of the scale of losses in the port of Busan following typhoon Maemi.

http://www.cargolaw.com

It is said that a modern urban citizen of these islands is liable to be captured on video 300 times a day by the security and observation devices which festoon our buildings and streets. At the individual level many individuals carry shirt pocket sized cameras for casual or opportunistic use. I have one myself. Adjusters, surveyors and all manner of superintendants and inspectors carry a digital camera as routinely as the ubiquitous mobile phone. The implications of this proliferation are just dawning upon us in very recent times. I am not sure any of us expected to live in a world where information and images circulated in the world like a force of nature. It has sort of crept up on us.

It does however mean that images that somehow cater to our misgivings emerge into the light of day like so many lillies. The tendency to concentrate larger and larger slices of economic output into a few hub ports and bigger and bigger ships has squeezed the middle out of the mundane world of shipping casualty. The loss galleries of our time are either utterly trite losses of relatively low value (the overwhelming majority of all freight forwarding claims are below $25 000 in value) or they tend to be on a spectacular scale as forces of nature or the laws of physics produce the image that says something which is difficult to express in a few words about the way we live now.

And who are the sources for this torrent of images we now see? They mostly seem to be people who find themselves near the scene. Strictly speaking they are not gawkers or loafers but people in workaday roles around the ports, ships and airports of the world. Their pictures are often launched without provenance or attribution, take independent wing, move hand to hand and shed whatever originating identities they have like a modern commodity.

4. Containerisable Bulk Cargo

Marine surveyor George Philip of ISS Abu Dhabi has noticed a problem arising out of the continuing containerisation of goods previously always carried in bulk:-

"It now appears that cargo of a bulk nature is also causing serious problems in container traffic. Recurring damages to cargos of carbon black (almost 20 M tons) packed in single poly-lined bags and held within the container are now in the limelight. Carbon black in the form of granules and free-flowing tend to spread the weight across the centre of the container panels, causing them to be bulged-out. At times the doors are forced out, with the locking bars off and no means available for closing the door for onward transit. In future containers may be required to be modified and reinforced with additional bars/frames to successfully transport cargos of such a nature."

Contactipping.com

5. The Future of the AAA

From David Taylor's speech given recently at the annual meeting of the Association of Average Adjusters

"I believe that the Association has a future, but it has a different future. There is, as I say a crying need for skilled claims professionals in the market and world-wide. There is, so far as I am aware, no professional body or association to which marine claims professionals can affiliate, associate or submit for examination in order to obtain a recognised qualification. There is no certification process. Having recently appreciated in Lloyd's that the current annual spend on incidental costs of claims in that market alone is £500 million a year and across the market believed to be in excess of £1 billion per year and given that rates never seem to rise sufficiently to give significant profitability, I believe there are key executives who are seeing a proper emphasis upon the skills of claims adjusters and the way claims are handled as being a more promising and permanent road to profitability, not to mention a road to securing loyal business. I spent some time earlier looking at the past and working methods because there is, as we all know "nothing new under the sun". The Average Adjusters Association is at the heart of the maritime community both in London and world-wide....

Where does the future lie? Perhaps in a natural evolution towards an "Association of Marine Claims Professionals" (AMCP) or Institute of Marine Claims Professionals (IMCP)

We understand a text of the speech in full will be available:-

http://www.average-adjusters.com

6. And Finally...

Thanks to Sophie Ignarski, your editor's eldest, for this bulletin from the gender wars

ROMANCE MATHEMATICS

Smart man + smart woman = romance

Smart man + dumb woman = affair

Dumb man + smart woman = marriage

Dumb man + dumb woman = pregnancy

OFFICE ARITHMETIC

Smart boss + smart employee = profit

Smart boss + dumb employee = production

Dumb boss + smart employee = promotion

Dumb boss + dumb employee = overtime

SHOPPING MATH

A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.

A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need.

GENERAL EQUATIONS & STATISTICS

A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.

A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.

A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

HAPPINESS

To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little.

To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.

LONGEVITY

Married men live longer than single men do, but married men are a lot more willing to die.

PROPENSITY TO CHANGE

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.

A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.

DISCUSSION TECHNIQUE

A woman has the last word in any argument.

Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

HOW TO STOP PEOPLE FROM BUGGING YOU ABOUT GETTING MARRIED

Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

PS from equipment man Jon Liss:-

This little guy is sitting at the bar just staring at his drink.He's been sitting there for half an hour when this big trouble-making truck driver steps next to him, grabs his drink and gulps it down in one swig. The poor little guy starts crying.

"Come on man, I was just giving you a hard time," says the truck driver. "I'll buy you another drink. I just can't stand to see a man crying."

"This is the worst day of my life," says the little guy between sobs."I can't do anything right. I overslept and was late to an important meeting, so my boss fired me. When I went to the parking lot, I found my car was stolen and I have no insurance. I grabbed a cab home but, after the cab left, I discovered I had forgotten my wallet in it. At home I found my wife in bed with the gardener. So I came to this bar and was thinking about putting an end to my life, and you show up and drink the damn poison."

BOW WAVE is published each week to around 9800 Readers in the transport,insurance,shipping and finance industries.

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