UK pesticides poison Red Sea port

A disaster hit the impoverished port of Djbouti when drums holding a highly hazardous chemical being exported from the UK to Ethiopia burst, adding up to 200 tonnes to the pile of obsolete pesticides in the region which need to be safely disposed. Mark Davis reports. 

Steps are being taken to isolate contaminated zones but there are no funds for cleanup. Photo: Kevin Helps.

Copper chrome arsenate (CCA) is a widely used timber treatment chemical that is applied to exterior timbers such as fencing and telegraph poles to protect against insect and fungal attack. CCA is carcinogenic, highly toxic to humans, wildlife, fish and marine organisms, extremely corrosive and persistent in the environment.
    The UK company CSI Wood Protection Ltd, based in Widnes, manufactures CCA. The Ethiopian Electricity Power Corporation (EEPC) uses it to treat wooden electricity poles. In October 2001 an order from the EEPC was shipped from the UK via Djibouti from where it should have travelled overland to Addis Ababa. (Ethiopia is a landlocked country and uses the port of Djibouti for marine transport). 
    The chemicals never arrived in Ethiopia, because when they were offloaded in Djibouti in January this year they were found to be leaking from their containers. According to site reports, the shipping agent responsible for getting the freight to Ethiopia tried to get local port staff to repackage the chemicals into new shipping containers. The staff were given no protective equipment and were not trained in the handling of hazardous materials. As a result several were hospitalised from the effects of exposure to the leaked CCA.

Wrong drums?
Shipping chemicals is a complex business. The International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code (IMDG) governs how chemicals should be classified, and as a result how they should be packed and labelled. 
The CCA shipment was packed into plastic drums, apparently at the request of the Ethiopian buyers. CSI’s production manager approved the use of the plastic drums that were supplied by Harcostar Drums Ltd of Huntingdon. 
    One theory suggests that plastic was an unsuitable packing material for CCA. Deciding what drums to use was based on a classification of the CCA as an arsenic based compound. Arsenic is a poison and a marine pollutant, but not corrosive, and is therefore in IMDG packing group III which could be packed in plastic.
    But CCA is not only an arsenic based compound; it also contains chromic acid which is highly corrosive to organic materials such as some plastics, and is an oxidising agent. In fact, the formulation sent to Ethiopia contained 34.2% chromic acid and only 24.5% arsenic pentoxide. It may be that the chromic acid reacted with the plastic drums and caused them to fail.
    Harcostar says that their containers were perfectly suitable for CCA and that chromic acid can be packed in plastic according to IMDG. Their theory is that the shippers treated plastic drums as if they were steel, which they are not. Plastic is not as rigid as steel and needs evenly distributed support. If the wrong sort of pallets are used and the drums are not packed with due care, they can collapse. Would this explain mass leakage in all ten shipping containers that were sent to Djibouti? 

Toxic chemicals leak from a shipping container in Djbouti Port. Photo: Kevin Helps.

Whose responsibility?
CSI Wood Preservatives Ltd is a subsidiary of the US based chemicals producer Rockwood Specialities Inc. It presents itself as a leader in timber protection products to the timber industry. There must be a familiarity in the company with packing requirements and the properties of its chemicals. According to the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency, it is up to the exporting company to ensure that the shipment complies with the IMDG Code. Under normal circumstances no additional inspection takes place.
    Before the shipment left the UK, ownership was transferred to a French based trading company ALM International: a company specializing in the distribution of chemicals and agrochemicals in West and Central Africa, but now also expanding to Anglophone African countries. This company contracted the Maritime Transit Service S.C. (MTS) based in Ethiopia but operating out of the port of Djibouti to ship the chemicals. ALM also ordered an inspection of the goods by SGS United Kingdom Ltd, which is part of the world’s largest testing, inspection, certification and verification organisation. The visual inspection, carried out in October 2001, merely confirmed the quantity and description of the goods, but did not specifically approve the packaging used. 
    CSI supplied the shippers and the final customer for the products (Ethiopian Electrical Power Corporation) with Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for the chemicals, but these were never passed on to the Djibouti port authorities. The MSDS provides essential data on the hazards presented by a chemical and precautions that need to be taken in its handling. 

Cleaning up the mess
So whose fault is it that 200 square metres of the port in Djibouti are now so heavily contaminated with CCA that no one can approach the area without full protective equipment? Who should take responsibility for the hospitalisation of local port staff? There are also unconfirmed rumours of fish kills in the Red Sea along the sailing route for the ship that carried the CCA, suggesting that the chemicals were leaking before they landed in Djibouti. And who will pay for the decontamination of the port in Djibouti and the removal and safe disposal of 200 tonnes of CCA? The answer is that it is entirely unclear.
    What is clear is that Djibouti, in common with most African countries, has no expertise, equipment or resources to deal with a hazardous spill of this nature. More than a month has already passed since the first signs of leakage were spotted on 18 January, and other than identification of the hazard and limited restriction of access to the contaminated area, little has been done.
    In early February, an FAO expert managing the obsolete pesticides project in neighbouring Ethiopia was asked to visit the site and advise on action. His report raises many questions and recommends a cleanup process that will cost close to a million US dollars. 
    PAN UK enquiries made it clear that the suppliers of the CCA and the drums are fully aware of the situation and are working with insurers to have the matter addressed. SGS, the organisation that inspected the goods prior to shipment had no concept of the scale of the spill when PAN UK spoke to them, thinking that a single drum had burst due to mishandling.
    Yet it is precisely the scale of this disaster that raises fundamental questions. Is this a shipping issue where the mechanisms designed to ensure safe shipment of dangerous goods have failed? Or is it a chemical issue where chemicals that cannot be safely dealt with in an African country have been sold and transported without due regard to health and safety?
    With an absence of any organisation taking a lead in ensuring that this matter is resolved, and that recommendations are followed through, PAN UK has stepped in to do what it can. The UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency has asked for the matter to be formally raised with them so that they can check compliance with IMDG and other relevant legislation. The World Bank has suggested raising an emergency fund to deal with this situation and others that may occur.
    PAN UK will continue to monitor the situation in Djibouti which illustrates too clearly that all the regulations and codes of good practice in the world cannot prevent pesticide related disasters. Unfortunately we can now add 200 tonnes of brand new CCA and several tonnes of heavily contaminated soil, shipping containers, trucks and other materials to the inventory of obsolete pesticides in African countries.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 55, March 2002, page 7]