In today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science, Gordon Murray, Executive Director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC), talks about the organization’s history, which includes several accomplishments in the field of dust fire and explosion safety.
Gordon joined the WPAC in 2008 as a consultant and became the Executive Director the following year. He recalls that his first five years in the role was spent on advocacy issues.
“Many people will remember [that in] 2012 in British Columbia, there were two very large sawmill explosions: Lakeland and Burns Lake, and in Prince George, there was another large explosion there [with] fatalities and lots of people injured,” he says.
The pellet plants tried to deal with the combustible dust question themselves, without much success. Then, in 2014, WorkSafeBC began putting pressure on sawmills and pellet plants to improve their dust safety practices. They responded by forming a committee to address the issue.
Dust conditions in British Columbia sawmills and pellet plants were horrifying in 2014.
“You’d be horrified if you would think about the mills or our plants at that time,” Gordon admits. You’d go in and there would be mountains of dust everywhere, piled up on beams, on top of equipment, lights that were not properly rated. And there’d be fires starting everywhere. It was really unbelievable.”
This committee was supposed to be a short-term endeavour to address an immediate concern and share its findings with all affected companies. However, it soon expanded to include members across Canada.
“We started working on a combustible dust audit and an inspection and identifying consultants that could come into our plants and help us to understand it,” he says.
The committee’s hard work soon paid off. Companies went from a 90% failure rate on WorkSafeBC inspections to a 100% compliance rate. Everyone’s willingness to work together and improve their relationship with provincial regulators yielded life-saving results.
“We started having other issues in our plants, too,” Gordon remembers. “Like how do you deal with the confined space, and lockouts, and guarding, training and supervision, and contract orientation, all other kinds of aspects of safety? So we said, ‘Let’s turn this combustible dust committee into a safety committee and commit to the culture.’”
Widespread safety issues in plants resulted in a committee dedicated to their resolution.
Today, the Wood Pellet Association of Canada has 62 members from pellet companies all across the country. Participation is strong and everyone has been involved in the organization’s annual work plans.
“A work plan is a fancy way of just describing a to-do list,” Gordon says. “We break down these different things, whether it’s combustible dust, holding a workshop, completing an audit checklist or having five companies do audits done by such and such a date, or whatever. We have a similar to-do list for confined space, for working at heights, for guarding. We share examples of good and bad, and then go back through all our plants and clean up all the guarding around the equipment and just really simple stuff like that.”
To keep the momentum going, WPAC holds regular meetings, shares its progress with WorkSafeBC, and maintains a safety culture through constant reinforcement. It is also a member of the BC Forest Safety Council.
“Now we’re working on more complicated kinds of things like critical control implementation as part of implementing process safety,” Gordon explains. “We’re working on the safety of belt dryers. We’re looking at equipment isolation in order to prevent propagation of events up and down the process line in pellet plants. We’re looking at operator training and optimizing the use of alarms, at centralizing nitrogen supply, different training and supervision.”
Other initiatives include:
- A workshop on silo fire safety that involved all the fire brigades from around the province
- A combustible gas video
- A six-webinar series on wood pellet manufacturing
- Resources for addressing combustible dust and raw material storage, most of which are posted on the wood pellet section of the BC Forest Safety Council website
“We now have members from Europe as well,” Gordon says. “We’ve got regular attendance from companies like Drax Power and GDF Suez and others. We also now have a collaboration with the European Pellet Council, which is the gathering of all the national pellet associations for the EU. So we’re starting to have some international impact.”
Conclusion
“[There isn’t] any secret to it other than deciding as an organization that safety is important to us, and that we need to be prepared to put money and effort and time into it,” Gordon says. “You can’t run your business without your people. So you’ve got to keep your people safe, make sure they go home at night to their families.”
If you would like to discuss further, leave your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach Gordon Murray directly:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordon-murray-4a7840a4/
Website: https://www.pellet.org/
If you have questions about the contents of this or any other podcast episode, you can go to our ‘Questions from the Community’ page and submit a text message or video recording. We will then bring someone on to answer these questions in a future episode.
Resources mentioned
Dust Safety Science
Combustible Dust Incident Database
Dust Safety Science Podcast
Questions from the Community
Dust Safety Academy
Dust Safety Professionals
Organizations
Wood Pellet Association of Canada
WorkSafeBC
BC Forest Safety Council
European Pellet Council
Resources
Wood Pellet Safety Resources (BC Forest Safety Council)
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DSS131: History of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada with Gordon Murray
