Cargo Insurance – Are you covered?

Cargo insurance might be on one of the least understood concepts in freight transportation. I have seen many claims come through from shippers expecting full recompense for damaged cargo only to find out that the shipment was covered for pennies on the pound under limited liability. I once had a customer who thought he was covered under a blanket policy; however, after his ocean container took a dive into the Pacific, he realized that he was not covered at all and potentially had to look at also paying the steamship line for the lost container.

I recently read an excellent article from Logistics Management about cargo and insurance liability that is a must read. Click here for the entire cargo insurance article.

One container ship equals pollution of 50 million cars

Complete article from gas2.org

I can see it now…outrage and calls for a complete end to global trade.

YRC reportedly seeks $1 billion bailout

Too big to fail???

Various media reports are reporting that YRC Worldwide Inc. will petition the government for $1 billion in tarp funds to help alleviate pension obligations.

After posting a $415 loss in the first quarter, the company is reportedly experiencing difficulty in dealing with the economic downturn. YRC is one of the nation’s largest domestic trucking companies with approximately 20% of the national market share of LTL freight.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article with all of the details.

Flu pandemic and its potential affect on logistics

I just read a pretty interesting article from IEEE spectrum about the affect a global pandemic could have on the U.S. freight rail networks and ports. Obviously with the recent outbreak of the swine flu (H1N1), I have been wondering what kind of affect a flu pandemic (or for that matter, any broad catastrophe) would have on global trade.

This particular article focuses on the potential difficulties that both the rail system and ports would encounter and it was determined that the rail system would bear the brunt of the issues mainly due to available resources and capacity.

Systems engineers at Cornell University and Sandia National Laboratories analyzed the impact of influenza at three levels of severity. In the midlevel scenario, in which absenteeism peaks at 13.6 percent during an outbreak, the effective capacity of the United States’ 18 major rail yards is cut by 10 percent. That might not seem like much, but there is so little spare capacity in the rail system that such a pandemic would lead to widespread problems lasting six to eight weeks.?

“We have a very brittle system already in rail,” says Linda K. Nozick, a professor of systems engineering at Cornell University, who was part of the team that performed the simulation. The main problem is with the nation’s 18 major rail yards. In February 2007, the time period the researchers used as a base, freight cars spent just over 28 hours on average at each yard they passed through. At the yards, trains are taken apart, inspected, and assembled to route freight around the network. “There’s a lot of demand at these yards and not a lot of resources,” Nozick says.?

From what I have been reading, the recent outbreak of swine flu might not be as serious as once thought; however, the article is a great read for insight into what kind of damage a global pandemic could inflict.

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