Unlabeled Cartons, Poorly Packaged Shipments Plague United Parcel

Hundreds of times a year, workers in the package delivery business find steaming, dripping, flaming or disintegrated cardboard boxes piled in their trucks or riding toward them on conveyor belts.

Shippers’ labels don’t always warn what’s inside. Yet these misbegotten packages may hold a grisly inventory of potentially harmful cargoes--auto batteries, human tissue and blood, acids, corrosive substances, pesticides, gasoline or radioactive materials.

In sheer volume, no company has more trouble with mislabeled, carelessly wrapped or badly capped hazardous materials than United Parcel Service Inc., the largest private package delivery system in the country.

Over the last decade, UPS reported 4,890 hazardous-material incidents, according to The Times’ study of U.S. Department of Transportation accident reports. During that period, 313 workers were injured and 166 people were evacuated as a result of spills. Federal Express, the shipper with the second most incidents, reported just 606 spills from 1982 to 1991 in its much smaller operation.

One striking UPS encounter with the unexpected began shortly before midnight on Oct. 18, 1989, as Santa Ana winds gusted across the tarmac at Ontario International Airport.

An igloo-shaped freight container was giving off a nauseating stink at the airport, UPS’ major West Coast air hub. The company flies almost 200,000 parcels through Ontario daily.

Now one of these--a carton roughly 8 by 10 by 18 inches--was about to send 41 people to the hospital.

Hauling packages out of the igloo, hunting for the one with the ominous smell, “was so chaotic,” remembers UPS worker Mohammad Al-Chalati. When the first of dozens of employees complained of breathing problems, headaches and nausea, Edward A. Shinoda, Al-Chalati’s boss, called in local hazardous-materials cleanup teams.

In the meantime, the box was isolated. Its contents were labeled “valves.” But inside, wrapped in white paper towels, was a leaking, dark blue gas cylinder.

More confusion. Shinoda got the shipper’s phone number from 411. An answering service took a message for the tiny Anaheim plant of Illinois-based Diversified CPC International Inc., which had presented the package to UPS.

“I was pretty upset,” Shinoda recalls. “After two or three hours of him diddling around, (CPC) called me back and told me what it was.” Even then, Shinoda says, the company at first claimed the cylinder held a non-hazardous substance.

In fact, it contained a teacupful of ethyl mercaptan, a hazardous flammable liquid that in far more minute quantities is added as a warning stench to otherwise odorless gases--particularly propane, butane and natural gas.

One of the most unpleasant odors known, ethyl mercaptan is a component of the skunk’s defensive spray, “sour” petroleum and human bad breath.

But in high concentrations it can be something far worse.

A 1985 spill of only 1,000 pounds stank up the entire state of New Jersey. According to hazardous-materials experts, even a teacupful--in the high concentration that Shinoda was dealing with and in an enclosed space, such as the airplane for which Diversified CPC’s package was destined--could cause nausea; intense irritation of the eyes, mucous membranes and lungs; even respiratory paralysis, chemical pneumonia and ultimately death.

“I can’t believe anybody would do that,” hazardous-materials expert Thomas K. Wray said of the abortive air shipment.

Federal Aviation Administration rules allow shipment of ethyl mercaptan in sealed cargo planes, though UPS’s rules ban it from the company’s jets. Federal law, in any event, requires shippers to tell freight companies when a package contains hazardous materials.

In Ontario, ground workers and aircraft personnel were lucky. None apparently sustained permanent injury.

It turned out that the package had been consigned to UPS by a 21-year-old employee with one month’s experience at Diversified CPC, the world’s largest manufacturer of hydrocarbon aerosols.

The Anaheim plant normally doesn’t handle ethyl mercaptan. But it did this once, as a favor to an old customer--a small company near Reno that was filling an order for camp stove fuel cylinders.

It was a favor the company came to regret.

CPC and the plant’s acting manager at the time, Steve Sanchez, pleaded guilty in July to unlawful transportation of hazardous material, giving U.S. prosecutors one of their first criminal convictions under the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act of 1975.

At a sentencing hearing next month, Sanchez faces 10 to 16 months in jail and a $10,000 fine; the company could be fined $100,000. Sanchez declined to discuss specifics of the case.

“It’s something that happened three years ago, and it should go away,” he said shortly before the indictment.

UPS--which estimates that it transports 10% of the U.S. gross national product--is quick to point out that just 30,000, or 0.3%, of its 9 million U.S. shipments daily contain hazardous substances.

Federal Express, the second biggest air freight firm, estimates that such cargoes make up 2% of the 1.4 million packages it ships each day.

Both companies say that hazardous materials do not present a significant danger in their business. Neither UPS nor Federal Express has reported a fatality from a hazardous-material spill.

“We know we have shippers who don’t necessarily try to break the laws--but that’s why we provide training. . . ,” said Fred Rine, managing director of safety and health for Federal Express. “Our employees don’t look upon this as a fearful environment that we’re putting them into.”

Still, Department of Transportation incident reports paint vivid portraits of the dangers faced by package delivery workers.

One UPS driver in Oklahoma only learned that he was about to deliver a carton of hydrochloric acid when he lifted it out of his truck “and felt his shirt get wet,” a supervisor later reported. “There were no hazardous-material labels on the pkg,” the incident report said. “The acid burnt his side and the box fell apart.”

Another puzzled UPS supervisor in Los Angeles didn’t know that the fluid that had leaked onto a driver’s arm and leg was sulfuric acid. He got little help from the shipper. A UPS representative phoned the customer to say it was “very important they let us know what it was,” according to the supervisor’s report. “They never called back.”

Union leaders say that the package delivery companies are more interested in getting packages through quickly than in protecting workers from hazardous materials.

UPS personnel, for instance, are instructed to ask what’s inside packages accepted over the counter, but not to inquire about those presented by regular business shippers. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents many UPS workers, wants UPS to open packages at random to make sure they contain what their shipping labels claim.

The Teamsters also recently declined to endorse a settlement between the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and UPS over the company’s hazardous-materials safety policies. UPS agreed to pay a $550,000 fine and provide better training for employees faced with mysterious spills. The union wants management or professional response teams to deal with these events.

“When there is a spill,” said Mario F. Perrucci, Teamsters vice president and director of its small package division, “we just want our people to get the hell out of the area and let the experts clean it up.”