We do take a lot of hazardous materials, but we take practically no explosives, and very little in the way of poisons, toxins, biohazards, or radioactive materials. Unfortunately the loading requirements for hazardous materials (including flammable solids, liquids, gases, and oxidizers) require that we load them in the back of the trailer close to the doors, so if any were present in any of the CACH trailers that burned, they would have gone up first.
Within a few minutes (a couple hours at the most), a list of all the packages that were destroyed could be compiled. Packages are scanned frequently in a hub for both internal and external tracking purposes, and the any hazardous materials are earmarked as such with their tracking information.
We find very little in the way of unmarked hazardous materials. There are very high federal fines and potential jailtime as deterents to people doing stupid stuff like that. Even we as UPS workers can be face some stiff fines and penalties if we deface or improperly handle a hazard. Any package is subject to being opened up (whether intentional or not) at just about anytime in the UPS system.
I'm really curious to know what the circumstances of this "flaming box" were. In my job at UPS, I'm the last one to handle a box before it goes down the slide into a trailer for shipment to another hub or package center, and I've had all sorts of packages break open and spill out, even hazards on occasion.
It just hit me, I believe that the CACH hub is much more automated than our hub here in Ohio is. I think my position is replaced by an automated conveyor system in Chicago, so the package could have travelled quite a distance in the CACH hub without human contact, whereas at my hub several people would have had contact with the package, and it likely could have been stopped before being sent into a truck. No person in their right mind (there are a few of us at UPS /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif ) would put a box that is on fire into a semi trailer full of other boxes. In my case I'd stop the belt and start hollering "fire", and grab the nearest fire extinguisher. I guess a highly automated system like at CACH can have its drawbacks.
-Keith
