DSS097: Lessons Learned from Two British Columbia Sawmill Explosions in 2012 with David Murray

In this episode of the Dust Safety Science Podcast, David Murray, Corporate Safety HR and Environment Manager for Gorman Group and co-chairperson of the Manufacturing Advisory Group in British Columbia, shares lessons learned from two British Columbia sawmill explosions that occurred in 2012.

David has over 15 years of experience in the BC woodworking industry. He has held various safety coordinator and manager roles. Last June, he wrote an article for the recent 2020 Dust Safety Week titled Lightning Doesn’t Have To Strike: Lessons Learned from the 2012 BC Combustible Dust Explosions..

This article shared some key insights into ways that industries handling combustible dust can make their facilities safer. In this episode, David delves further into the subject by answering the following questions:

What happened during these 2012 sawmill explosions?
How did the industry respond to the challenge?
Has any headway been made in combustible dust safety since 2012?
What were the first steps?

What happened during these 2012 sawmill explosions?

In January 2012, an explosion occurred at the Babine Forest Products sawmill, injuring many and tragically killing two employees. A few months later in April, a Lakeland sawmill exploded and killed two employees and injured many others.

“Industry stakeholders such as myself were caught completely off-guard by these two tragic events,” David says. “The first explosion came truly as a complete surprise. The second explosion proved those who believed the first one was an isolated event (to be) wrong.”

Wood mill employers, employees, regulators, and associations all reacted with confusion. What caused these explosions? What was to be done about them?

The employer group under the MAG pulled together a combustible dust taskforce that included a steering committee of the major CEOs, a union president, and a technical working group consisting of company safety experts and combustible dust experts from the insurance brokerages.

The major output from the MAG combustible dust taskforce was the MAG dust audit and its system. A scalable combustible dust program was designed with the necessary training infrastructure and control measures to mitigate combustible dust risk. To be a MAG member company today, a company needs to implement and maintain that MAG dust audit.

How did the industry respond to the challenge?

David said that no one could have predicted the magnitude of the 2012 explosions. Once the problem was researched and understood, he felt that addressing it was going to be difficult. Even his first draft of a combustible dust mitigation program had to be adjusted to allow for alternative depth thicknesses than the original NFPA requirements.

“One has to remember that most sawmill machinery were uncontained creators of high volumes of fine secondary wood dust that collected everywhere in the upper reaches of each facility,” he says. “The engineered controls for removing sawdust were at a macro level. Only the highest-speed machines that produced a great volume of that fine dust had dust extraction equipment like baghouses and cyclones.”

Has any headway been made in combustible dust safety since 2012?

David acknowledged that “the impossible was made possible.” Wood product manufacturers in BC have the necessary control measures in place to prevent an explosion from happening. They include:

Assessments
Training
The required level and type of cleanup
Inspections
Stakeholder collaboration
Regulatory consultation and oversight
Control devices
Audits
Investigations
Reporting

“It’s a long list and it’s not exhaustive, but these are all things that need to be in place and at a certain level in order to actually prevent an explosion from occurring,” he says.

What were the first steps?

David said that all stakeholders started by sharing a combustible dust mitigation program amongst themselves while they waited for the results of the explosion investigations. WorkSafeBC, the BC Safety Authority, (now Technical Safety BC) and the Office of the Fire Commissioner in BC issued several blanket orders for BC sawmills to implement, and each were designed to address the findings from their investigations.

WorkSafeBC began several phases of targeted combustible dust inspections.
The BC Safety Authority required a hazardous locations assessment that categorized the dust risk throughout facilities
The BC Fire Commissioner required fire department inspections of all sawmills and eventually the creation and implementation of a fire safety plan.

These three regulators worked with the industry and the unions to develop fire explosion prevention training. “I think that some of the products that they developed were quite great,” David says.

Conclusion

“Truly, to prevent similar catastrophes from occurring, the safety system must measure and prioritize the prediction of potential serious injury and fatality events,” David says.

He also recommends that:

Stakeholders running the safety system build and maintain trusting effective and cooperative relationships conducive to keeping workers safe.
All measures be taken to avoid complacency. “Complacency is almost like combustible dust: an insidious danger,” he warns. “[It] causes people to convince themselves that a terrible event cannot happen to them.”

If you would like to discuss further, leave your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach David Murray directly:

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-murray-crsp-a1640319/

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.