Hmm, I've been known to test a moisture content or two.
Around the clock for 40 years now.
Liquefication is so common it's no surprise any more.
Well, the vessels I work have cargoes like alcohol, acetone, paint thinner, etc ;)
These ships have 3 to 5 or more compartments separating the cargo from port to stbd and about a dozen from bow to stern. In addition to ballast tanks etc. So the constant liquid movement does not produce the instability that can occur in a solid-cargo ship having only a single compartment between the port & stbd.
Solid cargoes I normally do not do, except sometimes when an asphalt gets logged in.
I must say I usually find no fault, nope, no fault at all.
But, and it's a big but, when things don't go exactly as planned the scale can be somewhat overwhelming.
At the begining I did on-board measurement for a year before earning a premier port laboratory.
I almost never go to the docks any more unless it's really serious, the cargo surveyors just bring the official samples in. So I still know how it is.
Anyway, one time way back then I was loading a number of chemicals onto a multi-grade ship and the acrylonitrile had some stowage in a couple deck tanks in addition to some normal compartments. Deck tanks as the name implies look like (sometimes are) rail cars without wheels, welded to the deck in spots.
Now this monomer is an organic cyanide derivative which is a lot nastier than your everyday benzene or methanol. Just as flammable, more sickening. And we got to sample it when the movement is 95 percent complete. Normally you would be looking down into a hatch at your reflection in tonnes of product, but a deck tank you must climb.
I get up there and the tank is just starting to overflow, acrylo is everywhere, they had failed to slow down enough for the smaller tanks so it was pouring down the sides and running down the deck.
Instinct kicked in and I quickly filled my bottles by hand, got out of there and let them have their incident to themselves for a few hours before they called us back to calculate the losses.
Another time we had loaded 3,000 tonnes of (flammable) para-xylene so there was a lot of samples and I left mine on the deck when I went into the deckhouse. After doing all the paperwork we went out the other door and those were not my samples so we had to go back the other way. Just inside the doorway in the last office there was a small trashcan fire just getting started where someone had thrown a butt on their way out.
My partner stomped on it and his foot almost caught on fire, then we ran with the wastebasket into a laundry room and filled it with water.
Nobody noticed, we had to go and find the Chief Mate and inform him how we saved his ship. He gave us each a bottle of liquor.
And these both happened in Texas City, location of the deadly Texas City Disaster:
Technical office workers (programmers are some of the worst about this) tend to have this idea that everything is done consistently and perfectly all the time. In reality everything's done by humans and it isn't done perfectly pretty often. But because the cleanup is also done by humans the failures are mostly handled near where they happen rather than being sent through the system so you don't get failure modes like one piece of software that chokes on a config doesn't bring down a noticeable fraction of the internet.
