DSS 136: Charting a Path Forward in Combustible Dust Safety, Part 2

Last week’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast replayed the first half of Dr. Chris Cloney’s keynote presentation at the 2021 Dust Safety Conference. This week, we feature the second half of ‘Combustible Dust Safety: Open Challenges and Charting a Path Forward’ and discuss three more challenges:

Awareness of the hazard and risk
Language and communication
Having a safe place to share information

These challenges are identified in the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s 2020 contractor report stemming from the 2017 dust explosion at Didion Milling in Cambria, Wisconsin. Entitled “Dust Hazard Learning Review, ” it gathered feedback from industries that handle combustible dust to identify the main barriers to improvement in the control and mitigation of combustible dust hazards. The CSB received 57 responses, which appear throughout the safety review.

Awareness of the Hazard and Risk

Dust explosions are comparatively rare events, which lulls industrial organizations into a false sense of security. While the recognition of these risks is greater than it was in the past, too many dust-related incidents occur as a result of ignorance or complacency.

Due to the complex variables that must come together to enable a dust explosion, operations personnel are frequently unaware of the true likelihood of these events or that when they occur, they can be catastrophic.

In other cases, practical drift happens. Originally identified by Scott Snook in his book Friendly Fire, practical drift is a slow uncoupling of practice from procedure. His theory is that as people operate in an environment controlled by procedures, they’re constantly acting to reduce effort and improve efficiency based on real-time results.

With an infrequent event such as dust explosions, this iterative process can result in many iterations before an explosion actually occurs. Allowing the system to change dramatically before the results of these changes are made known can be applied to combustible dust events.

Another issue is how we start normalizing risk. Days and even years can go by without anything happening. Every day that we go without a serious issue, safety practices will drift. That’s when you get these large explosions. Then, looking back, we always think, “Oh, we saw these fires happen every day. But it never seemed to be an issue.”

Language and Communication

Language and communication issues present another challenge.

By referring simplistically to dust on a daily basis, we may be conditioning workforces to underestimate its dangers. Do we need a more assertive word for dust? Perhaps call it ‘fuel’ instead?

The same goes for housekeeping. One party who responded to the CSB request for feedback said, “Why do we use the same term to clean the bathroom as we do for major risk mitigation?”

By using simple and ‘harmless’ terms, we’re conditioning ourselves and our workforce to not see dust as a hazard. This is why we will be trying to create some focus sessions with the Dust Safety Academy in 2021 to see if we can come up with some better terms for things like dust and housekeeping.

Having a Safe Place to Share Information

According to the report authors, the topic of sharing information received the strongest response, with the most popular recommendation being an anonymous reporting system. This need is one of the key drivers behind the idea of DustSafetyShare.com. It’s a platform where you can anonymously share information about incidents, near misses, safety tips, and lessons learned. If an incident is shared and we can’t find publicly available information, we won’t use the name of the company in the incident report.

Conclusion

In this episode and the last one, we talked about five challenges in total: response to dust fires, development of a global incident reporting network, awareness, language and communication, and having a safe place to share information. They all feed into what we’re doing with our various platforms in 2021 and beyond. So will you join us?