If you’ve been on my mailing list for a while, you’ll know that all kinds of crazy things happen in the world of freight. 

And smuggling is one of them! Every year customs stop huge amounts of illegal goods from entering the country – whether that’s drugs, weapons, endangered animals, rough diamonds or obscene items (yup, those are on the banned list too!) But that’s not all that gets smuggled… sometimes humans do too. 

As you know, customs may screen any containers that leave or enter a port, manually checking, scanning or running tests to ensure that the cargo meets that country’s import and export laws. But did you know that they can “gas test” them too? A gas probe is one of the ways customs check if there could potentially be any living beings inside a container without having to open it up.A small probe is entered into the container and takes a reading of the different gases inside. 

This isn’t just to check for humans and animals (although a low oxygen and high CO2 reading could indicate that!) but it can check to ensure that hazardous cargo hasn’t built up dangerous levels of gases inside that could explode while in transit. If any of the readings are off, the container is opened and manually checked. 

We had this happen to one of our client’s cargo recently (don’t worry, he wasn’t smuggling lions or diamonds!) The shipment contained a collection of marble stone, to be used for worktops, furniture and the like… But the gas probe reading was off the chart. The container had to be taken off-site and opened, so the gas could be let out and the cargo checked. Customs found nothing untoward, and to this day no one has any idea how a container full of stone could have created that much gas. 

A long time ago, we had another similar unsolved story. A client was importing some fancy, grand pianos from Japan. They made it across the oceans and into the welcoming arms of their owner, but there was one problem… They smelt awful. They aired them out, fumigated them, revarnished them… nothing worked. They still stank. Eventually, the manufacturer had to send replacements, but we never did find out what made them so smelly in the first place! Another unsolved freight mystery…

How about you? Do you have any unsolved freight mysteries to share? Or ideas of why marble worktops might create copious amounts of gas? Or what could make pianos insanely stinky? 

I’d love to hear from you…