DSS223: History of the Combustible Dust National Emphasis Program with Jeffrey Wanko

In today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast, Jeffrey Wanko, Director of the Office of Chemical Process Safety and Enforcement Initiatives at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, talks about the history of the Combustible Dust National Emphasis Program.

This is a replay of what we call a “fireside chat” at the end of Day 1 from the Global Dust Safety Conference. In this chat, we covered the National Emphasis Program on combustible dust here in North America and, in particular, in the United States. We talked about:

OSHA’s past involvement with combustible dust
The present initiative to re-release the Combustible Dust National Emphasis program
Where Jeff sees things going with his team and with the National Emphasis Program and how that relates to combustible dust safety.

In the first half of the discussion, we covered the past, talking about the history of OSHA and combustible dust safety in the United States. The targeted timeline started in 2003 with Hayes Lemmerz, West Pharmaceutical and CTA Acoustics combustible dust explosions, all of which were investigated by the US Chemical Safety Board. We also talked about:

The roles that NFPA, Chemical Safety Board, and OSHA were playing at the time
The initial release of the Combustible Dust National Emphasis Program

The second half of the chat with Jeff will be covered in the next edition of the podcast.

In 1989, Jeff earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Syracuse University. Later, he pursued a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. During the early stages of his career, he worked in different industry roles, including environmental engineering and project management. Eventually, he transitioned to a process safety engineering role within companies dealing with combustible dust, specifically in the vitamins and nutritional products sector.

After six years as an investigator with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, Jeff played a role in developing the 2006 Combustible Dust Hazard Study. He then joined OSHA in 2011 and held various positions, including Safety Engineer, Supervisor, and Director of the Office of Chemical Process Safety and Enforcement Initiatives. His team is accountable for enforcing the National Emphasis Program on Combustible Dust.

What’s the Role of OSHA That You See in Industry?

“OSHA has a very broad mission: one of the largest in the United States government given the number of resources and the number of establishments that are out there for inspection, “Jeff said.

Federal OSHA covers 26 states with approximately 900 inspectors, while the remaining states have their own programs. With several million workplaces requiring inspection and competing priorities for inspectors, preventive inspections are crucial for low-frequency, high-consequence events like combustible dust incidents. The National Emphasis Program addresses this issue by sending compliance officers to industries and establishments with combustible dust hazards before incidents occur, though post-incident inspections are also conducted.

Jeff explained that It’s ideal to conduct planned inspections rather than unprogrammed ones related to complaints, fatalities, and incidents. This approach has a positive impact on establishments through compliance officer interactions with managers and the threat of inspection. The National Emphasis Program (NEP) provides a list of codes, indicating facilities targeted for inspection. While the law enforcement view is the threat of inspection, proactive collaboration with establishment management to abate hazards is essential, even if violations are noted. Ultimately, abating hazards is the priority.

“One of the things that OSHA has available, both for its compliance officers as well as the regulated community, is a technical manual for the more robust and technically challenging inspections,” Jeff explained. “There is a manual. Two years ago we published the combustible dust chapter in that manual. We took the basic information about combustible dust from the original 2007 NEP and transferred it to the OSHA technical manual, which is publicly accessible.”

What Was Your Industry Involvement in 2003, When Several Explosions Occurred?

Jeff recalled that in 2001, he joined Roche Vitamins in New Jersey as a process safety engineer for the facility. However, vitamins, which are organic solids and particulates, and some metal catalysts used in their production, are combustible. As a result, he had to become an expert on combustible dust for the facility.

He moved to the Chemical Safety Board in October of 2005. At that time, reports had been issued for CTA Acoustics, Hayes Lemmerz, and West Pharmaceuticals. However, they were just starting to conduct research on combustible dust regulation and hazard abatement in the U.S. for a full hazard study. So he joined that team.

“Our primary focus at that time was OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard 1910-1200 and its relation to safety data sheets (SDSs) in educating facilities about combustible dust hazards,” Jeff said. “To achieve this, I reviewed around a thousand SDSs from various sources, including manufacturers and the web. Unfortunately, I discovered that at that time, SDSs either did not address combustible dust hazards or addressed them in a generic manner. There was no information on the severity of the explosion or downstream usage of solids processed and divided into small particles.”

He recommended including combustibility language in safety data sheets to the ANSI standard. The language could identify dust as a hazard and how to recognize it. In 2006, the CSB released the Hazard Study, followed by OSHA issuing a comprehensive combustible dust standard and initiating a National Emphasis Program for enforcement.

OSHA Rulemaking ‘Extremely Difficult’

“The problem is that rulemaking on the OSHA side is extremely difficult,” Jeff said.

OSHA has historically lacked a comprehensive combustible dust standard When the OSHA Act was enacted in the early 1970s, they were given two years to adopt national consensus standards, and a combustible dust standard was not added to the set of 1910 standards. The reasons for this are unclear, but it could be an oversight given the amount of work involved in standing up a national agency in two years.

Many people are surprised to learn that due to the constitutional requirement of due process, OSHA cannot simply walk into a facility to inspect it. A formal complaint from an employee or referral from another agency or the media alleging a violation of the act can provide reasonable cause for an unprogrammed inspection.

Programmed inspections, such as Emphasis Programs, are used to establish due process by identifying industries or establishments suspected to have hazards. Emphasis Programs exist for various hazards such as trenching, falls, silica exposure, combustible dust, and process safety management.

“These facilities have these known hazards,” Jeff explained. “Therefore, it is our responsibility as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to enter this facility, provided we do it in a random fashion.”

Each Emphasis Program includes a randomness factor to ensure inspections are conducted randomly. The two main Emphasis Programs that Jeff manages, Chemical Process Safety National Emphasis Program and Combustible Dust National Emphasis Program, aim to prevent low-frequency high-consequence incidents. These programs establish due process and provide instructions for compliance officers on what to look for and where to take samples. The programs also notify the regulated community that an inspection may occur.

“I was still with CSB when the first two versions of the NEP were released,” Jeff recalled. “My understanding was OSHA combed through its accident database and found a set of industries – NAICS codes or SIC codes at the time- where we had incidents. Then we collected those and said, ‘All right, this industry potentially had an incident. Therefore, facilities in this NAICS code have a potential for an incident. Therefore, they go into the ‘must inspect’ list.’

“So at the time there were two appendices: one was D1 which was the ‘must inspect’ list and the other was D2 which was the ‘can inspect list’. Appendix D2 was just those that were suspected of having a hazard. In the new version we got rid of that.”

Why Did the National Emphasis Program Get Re-Evaluated?

After the Imperial Sugar incident, which resulted in 14 fatalities, the list was quickly revised to include sugar refineries,” Jeff said. “Many of them were inspected under the program shortly after. OSHA also opened an inspection at the Imperial Sugar Facility in Louisiana soon after the explosion. But that was the primary and only reason that I know for revising it in 2008.”

Conclusion

Next week on the podcast, we’ll cover the second half of this fireside chat where we discuss the recent release or re-release of the National Emphasis Program in February 2023. We’ll explain why it was needed and the changes that were made. We’ll also talk about Jeff’s vision for OSHA’s involvement in combustible dust safety and the role he sees it playing in the future.

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

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-wanko-73885b1/

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.