In this episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast, we interview UK explosion safety consultant Alan Tyldesley. We talk biomass fire and explosion hazards and the regulatory approaches used in the UK to deal with dangerous substances and explosive atmospheres.
During his 21-year career with the UK Health and Safety Executive, Alan spent nearly 15 of those years as a dust explosion specialist. And for the past 13 years, he has been running his own firm, Tyldesley Explosion Consulting, providing professional advice regarding dust explosions, chemical warehousing, and hazardous area classification.
During this interview, we asked Alan:
- What are some of the biggest fire and explosion hazards in the biomass sector?
- How do biomass storage methods affect fire protection?
- How have fire and explosion safety regulations evolved in Europe and internationally?
- How can we best move towards a global standard for combustible dust safety?
Our focus for 2019 is to better understand combustible dust as a global problem and come up with global solutions. To support this goal, we are interviewing experts from around the world to gain a better understanding of what’s working in combustible safety within these regions and their these industries. One such combustible hazard is biomass material.
Biomass Fire & Explosion Safety
Biomass is organic material used as a fuel, frequently to generate electricity in power stations. One of the most common sources is dried wood pellets made from cultivated trees and shipped from North America to Europe and other parts of the globe. The loads are so large that self-heating can be a problem: by the time a ship arrives at the dock, a pellet fire may already be in progress.
Biomass material like wood pellets are typically unloaded from ships and transferred to an interim storage site using belt conveyors. These conveying systems are enclosed because they trail dust, but the problem is that dust accumulates. If an explosion occurs, it or the resulting fire could run the whole length of the conveyor.
Storage Methods
Wood pellets are stored in bulk at the dock terminal after unloading or at the power station. Storage is typically in a large silo: one of the biggest is the 80,000 ton-structure at the Drax power station in the UK.
There are two primary types of storage systems, both of which have their benefits and challenges:
- Silos, or cylindrical storage units. Larger ones can be challenging because they limit what you can do in terms of fire protection, as determining whether you’ve actually got burning inside the silo can be quite tricky.
- Flat-floor storage, which consists of warehouses that allow you to go in with long lances and probe the temperature deep inside the pile to detect localized heating. The challenge with this storage method is that people are in the storage area, which is always a danger.
Ignition Sources
With wood pellets, common ignition sources include:
- Self-heating during transit
- Dust trapped between fast-moving parts on the conveyor system
- Metallic objects such as screws and nails, which can also jam the machinery
It can be difficult to catch a fast-moving, burning clump of material and prevent it from dropping into the system because these belt conveyors can’t be suddenly shut down. With so much momentum built up, suddenly slamming the motor could cause the material to spill over, get dispersed in the air, and cause an explosion or flash fire.
These dust explosions have the ability to interrupt power supply (which is why some of the UK’s biggest users have requested two different boats to bring in product) and even disrupt the national economy if the event occurs at a major shipping port.
Equipment Safety Regulations in Europe
There has been an ongoing effort in Europe to harmonize equipment design standards. The movement began in the 1940s and 50s, when it was recognized that the flame-proof motors used in the mining industry should be the same whether the mine was in Germany, France, or the UK.
Progress was slow until 1994, when the European Union passed a directive called ATEX, which established common standards for a wide range of electrical equipment. It expanded into mechanical equipment and explosion protection devices. However, this 1994 directive did not become mandatory until 2003.
Almost all of these standards were European. DIN, the German Institute for Standardization, then proposed to turn them into international standards. Most of them are now ISO standards.
Standards were also developed to protect the end user. In the UK, the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations (DSEAR) addresses fire risks, explosion and similar events arising from dangerous substances used or present in the workplace.
Alan recommended that we watch the North American insurance industry guidelines for direction on how to evolve safety standards even further. Factory Mutual has codes for safety considerations that do not appear to be covered by other bodies.
Moving Towards a Global Standard
Alan discussed the differences that exist between some national regulatory bodies. For example, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in the U.S. has a standard for fire protection in belt conveyors, but Europe does not.
When asked about the best approach to create a global community with unified safety standards, Alan stated that it was a matter of “endless education.” For example:
- Each new generation of engineers needs to appreciate that what looks like fairly harmless sawdust or flour or sugar dust can be incredibly destructive if mishandled.
- Workers need to understand that smaller plant fires need to be taken seriously, especially if they happen frequently. A series of minor incidents may one day result in a catastrophic loss.
Conclusion
Alan mentioned that during his time at HSE UK, he acquired a booklet titled “Prevention of dust explosions in grain elevators–an achievable
The goal of this publication, which came out in 1980, is similar to the goal of Dust Safety Science and its tools, the Combustible Dust Incident Database and the Dust Safety Science Podcast: to understand combustible dust safety as a worldwide problem and develop worldwide solutions.
Resources Mentioned
Dust Safety Science:
Combustible Dust Incident Database
Dust Safety Science Podcast
Alan Tyldesley’s Consultancy:
Tyldesley Explosion Consulting
Organizations:
Health and Safety Executive UK
National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)
Standards:
International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
DIN – German Institute for Standardization
Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations (DSEAR)
Publications:
United States. Department of Agriculture. Office of the Special Coordinator for Grain Elevator Safety and Security
Power Stations:
Drax Power Station
Previous Podcast Episodes:
DSS 009: DSS009: Understanding Combustible Dust as a Global Challenge and Developing Global Solutions (Our 2019 Dust Safety Focus Area)
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DSS 010: Biomass Fire & Explosion Hazards and UK regulations with Alan Tyldesley
Full Episode Transcript
Chris Cloney: [00:09] Welcome to episode number ten of the Dust Safety Science Podcast, where we’re creating a worldwide global community around workplace safety and industries, handling and generating powders and dusty materials. Today’s episode, we have an interview with Alan Tyldesley, who is an explosion safety consultant in the United Kingdom in the UK. Alan also spent 20 years with the Health and Safety Executive, and 15 of those years as their top expert in dust explosions within the United Kingdom. In this interview, we covered two topics. The first is fire and explosion safety in biomass handling industries. And then the second is the regulatory approach used in the UK, combining the European Atex directives and how that’s been adopted into the DSR, the dangerous Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres regulations within the United Kingdom. In the interview, we mentioned several different resources as well as different regulations, standards and bodies. You can go to the show notes dust safety Science.com slash ten. That’s the number ten to get the information from this episode, and also links through to those resources mentioned and the different regulatory standards that are involved. And with that, I just want to say thank you, as always, for listening to the Dust Safety Science Podcast and hope you guys enjoyed today’s interview. Welcome to the Dust Safety Science Podcast. In today’s episode, we’re interviewing Alan Tyldesley. Alan has a very comprehensive background in combustible dust safety and explosion safety. He spent 21 years with the United Kingdom, the UK Health and Safety Executive, HSE, with 15 years of that being their topical expert on dust explosion. Finishing with HSC in 2005, he moved on to consulting for about 12 or 13 years with Tyldesley Explosion Consulting. That’s where he’s kind of wrapping up now, and I really look forward to having Alan on the show. So I just want to say thank you, Alan, for coming and I look forward to this interview.
Alan Tyldesley: [01:58] You’re welcome. Chris, pleased to share my experience.
Chris: [02:00] So those of you that are following the podcast for a couple episodes now you’ll know that our focus for 2019 is understanding Combustible Dust as a global problem and coming up with global solutions. As part of that, we’re going to be interviewing people from around the world, from the United Kingdom, from Canada, from China, from the United States, to really figure out what’s working in combustible dust safety within these regions and within these industries, and what’s working on regulations on regulation side, just to get the experience from these experts combined together. So that’s really why I have Alan here today. And I asked him beforehand, what’s the biggest topic right now that’s of concern in the United Kingdom or one of the biggest topics. And he mentioned that biomass fire and explosion safety in those industries is a really big area. So that’s what we’re going to talk about first. And then we’ll go into kind of the regulatory side, what’s happening in the UK over the last number of years and how that’s working compared to other regions. So, Alan, maybe we’ll start with kind of jumping into the biomass side. What are some of the hazards that you’ve seen from fire and explosion safety within the biomass sector? And maybe if you could spend a little time just explaining to the viewers that aren’t familiar, what is biomass, what materials are involved and what’s that look like?
Alan: [03:12] Right. How do we talk about that? Because I’ve had involvement with quite a string of different projects that are either storing biomass or importing it. It comes from around the globe, and different types of products have different hazards. The biggest quantities are probably shipped around from a deliberate cultivation of trees and turning pellets, creating dried pellets which can be shipped from North American to Europe or around Europe, or in from other parts of the globe to the UK. This material is handled in huge shiploads, and we know that it has a self-heating problem, so that a ship may arrive at a dock and somewhere in the middle of a big parcel of pellets, tens of thousands of tons, it might already be burning by the time it arrives. That’s quite a problem for the shippers.
Chris: [04:08] And so once it gets off the ships, what normally is the next stage for that material?
Alan: [04:13] The typical unloading system is usually a screw conveyor, which you can move and direct around within the hold. Cevital is the main name I’m familiar with, and they go from there on to belt conveyors. Usually the quantities that we’re talking about are so big that other conveying methods don’t really get a look in so long belt conveyors that run across to some intermediate storage. And we’ll talk about the storage arrangements in a moment. These belt conveyors, which inevitably allow dust to escape from fast moving belts, look a lot like coal mine galleries. In many ways, they’re enclosed to stop the surrounding area being covered in dust. But it means that you’ve got dust in clothes within a long walkway and a fast moving belt. And if you ever have an explosion in one of those, you could anticipate that the flame would run the whole length of the conveyor.
Chris: [05:13] Certainly. Yeah. They saw that in not necessarily with, with wood biomass, but the Imperial sugar refinery explosion, which we covered previously in the podcast where they enclosed their conveying system conveying sugar underneath their silos, which allowed it to get above the minimum explosive concentration. And yeah, I think it was 100 ft of conveyor that when the explosion went off, went through and ripped off the panels the whole way. And then obviously they had the whole facility lost after that. So in closing, the conveying system does lead to those kind of hazards. What are the ignition sources that tend to come up in those, especially with unloading of wood pellets?
Alan: [05:49] Well, the most obvious is the stuff is already burning by the time you start to unload it, and you need to watch for that as a problem. But then you’ve got powerful machinery. So anywhere that you’ve got high powered motors, driving fast moving rollers, if you get dust trapped in moving parts. First it will tend to warm up gradually and then dry so you get a steadily drier. Accumulation of dust around bearings and on the fins of motors and so on. And then. That starts to ignite spontaneously from a slightly elevated temperature and much drier material.
Chris: [06:26] And then you have that fire on a, on a conveying system. So it also moves in space and time.
Alan: [06:31] That’s right. That’s really tricky to catch a fast moving burning clump of material or perhaps drops into the system because you can’t shut these belt conveyors slam shut. There’s too much momentum tied up in the product. And if you try to slam shut the motor, you finish up with everything split in a huge mess. So they wound down slowly.
Chris: [06:57] And you probably have. If you did that, then the material would spill over and get dispersed in the air and you could have that could cause the explosion to happen.
Alan: [07:04] That’s right. So you can only wind these things down in sequence. If you’ve got a series of conveyors, as they often have, then it takes quite a few minutes to wind down the system.
Chris: [07:13] Well, that’s a really good, really good description of that process. I’ve actually never heard anyone explain it in such simple terms, but in such effective terms, once the once the conveying system gets off the ships and they move it in, are they traditionally storing it like a large offshore, like a large terminal, or is that being transported inland to specific industries and specific facilities right away?
Alan: [07:36] The docks usually have some intermediate storage, and then it’s transshipped into train loads conventionally to onwards to the power stations. So you have two options really for bulk storage, either at the power station or the dock terminal, you can put it in large silos. And some of these are the biggest silos that I know anywhere in power handling industries.
Chris: [07:59] Or would the diameter be on those?
Alan: [08:01] The biggest I think I’ve come across are the Drax power station in the UK, where they’re, they’re domes rather than cylindrical storage units.
Chris: [08:10] 80,000 tonnes okay, wow.
Alan: [08:13] That’s really rather big. And it limits what you can do in terms of fire protection. The alternative is flat floor storage, where an overhead conveyor drops material, usually into a chute, and a sort of bridge unit spreads the material along the length of a long, long building. So it’s dropped successively producing a pyramid shaped heap of product. And then if that’s your preferred method of storage, it’s reclaimed, usually with freeze steered vehicles. People go into that building to load it onto road vehicles or other transportation means. So you have a choice between silos which you don’t normally go into, or this flat floor storage where people are working.
Chris: [09:04] And are the hazards different between those two kinds of systems?
Alan: [09:07] I think they’re really distinctly different. The silos. The biggest scale is such that our design work for explosion relief panels are really stretching the bounds of credibility of the design equations really valid? They’re so large that inverting them becomes a seriously impractical option. The quantities of gas you might need are just huge, and determining whether you’ve actually got burning inside the silo is quite tricky. Sure, the alternative for flat floor storage puts people in the storage area, which is always a danger. You’ve got people close to the working, close to the storage, but on the other hand, you can go in with long lances and probe the stock temperature deep inside the pile and get some idea whether there’s any localized heating. Secondly, you can ensure stock rotation, which matters. You really don’t want to store this material longer than you have to. But if you’re sending people into the silo, you can into a flat floor storage, you can see that it’s clear. You can make sure that there are no hidden corners, and you can clear the dust accumulations off the walls fairly straightforwardly. You can’t do that in a silo.
Chris: [10:28] That makes a lot of sense. I’ve never thought of it that way. Where it’s really six of one half dozen the other because you can send people in that can do more of an observation of the overall system instead of just having probes at predefined locations. But then you have people in there or you can go and have less observation, but then you’re taking the people out and, and you could have facility damage or injuries coming from other sources.
Alan: [10:54] Yes, we’ll perhaps come back to this, but the, the, the norm in all the dust handling industries has always been to enclose your process. If you enclose your process, then you don’t get dust around the building. So the flat floor storage runs quite contrary to the legal requirements. And you’ve got to make some elaborate justifications to say that this is actually acceptable. So far, HSC has not ever forced people away from flat floor storage. But I do wonder if somebody might take them on, right?
Chris: [11:28] Yeah, I think we’ll come back to that because I think we’re close on the pellet side. So now we have it inland. We have it in storage. Normally at power plants, that seems to be the biggest consumer that you’re mentioning. And then from there, I assume they use screw conveyors and other conveying systems to get it into the facility. And then what’s the actual use, the end use of the product.
Alan: [11:49] That burning this material? I’m not sure. I’ve looked terribly closely at the different combustion systems, but most solid combustion systems grind the material down to dust before you blow it into the combustion chamber. So coal that has long been the preferred means of power generation is to run pulverized fuel burners. It’s easier to control the flow rates, and it’s easier to control the heat output. You can modulate the temperature up and down much more readily with a powder feed, which is continuous, rather than buying big lumps of coal. So I think that’s probably how most of the pellets are handled as a powder in the final process.
Chris: [12:36] That makes sense. So they have their grinder or their hammer mill or whatever their size reduction method is in the line that goes through. And then they burn it in the burners. Do they have any issues with I know in other industries, say grain handling or or even just in, in other wood handling industries, they have issues with metallic objects in the line like screws, nails, other things that could be decomposing again causing self-combustion. Is there any issues with that kind of tramp material getting through into the system as an ignition source?
Alan: [13:06] There must be examples of that. And I’ve seen the metal trap at some smaller silos at the Drax power station, and they were bringing out Trump metal, but in fairly modest quantities. I’m much more concerned about the power stations that run with scrap timber accumulated from domestic waste or pallets or whatever, which we know has metal embedded in it, and quite large chunks sometimes. So that’s a separate much cruder fuel, but nevertheless used for quite sizable power plants. And sometimes the chunks of metal are so big that they jam the machinery and must get stuck in moving parts. And a real problem. So pellets are better for that and scrap timber, certainly. That’s a real issue.
Chris: [013:58] Certainly. Okay. So I think that’s a really good overview of how the different hazards may arise in kind of start to finish from biomass. Do you have it doesn’t need to be a specific example with a name, but do you have kind of an example of an incident that happened and maybe some of the processes that were put in place to improve the safety moving forward with that facility?
Alan: [14:20] The incidents we’ve seen have largely been at port handling and storage rather than at the power station. So, I’m sure some of the power stations have had fires, but certainly some of the UK’s biggest users deliberately wanted two different ports to supply their product because they knew there was a risk that one could have a fire and take the feedstock off. If you burn out your importation facility, it may well take months to put it back rather than a few days. And the power station can’t afford to shut.
Chris: [15:00] That’s a really good point, because I’ve seen that. I haven’t seen that happen in the UK, but certainly in some other countries where a fire or explosion at the terminal has shut down either the power or the food source. Sometimes if it’s a grain handling terminal, I think I’ve seen it happen in Brazil, potentially some other places around the world where at those shipping terminals, if you have a big large scale issue, it actually shuts down down the line. A whole lot of potentially important consumer needs or things that are needed by the public. So that’s kind of an interesting thought process.
Alan: [15:37] Economic angle on this as well as the safety angle.
Chris: [15:40] So I think it makes sense now that’s a really great overview of biomass. I want to talk about the UK regulation system, which I don’t actually know a lot about other than just some of the some of the terms and things that are used. But if you give us just the 40 foot view of what that looks like, and then maybe we could dive into some of the specific aspects, right?
Alan: [16:02] If you’re looking at it, explosion safety. Then there’s been a move to try and harmonize design standards for equipment for a very long time, but it made slow progress in the early years. The first standards bodies to try and create equipment standards for electrical equipment go back to the 1940s and 50s, I think, where it was recognized as the mining industry the motors or the lighting or whatever, a flame proofed motor that was suitable for a coal mine in Germany surely should be pretty much the same as a flame proof motor suitable for a coal mine in the UK or France. But it made very slow progress and it didn’t really accelerate until 1994, when the European Union passed a uh, a directive called Atex, which set out rules for common standards for a whole range of goods. The electrical equipment was the starting point, but they wanted to expand that, and so it expanded into mechanical equipment and explosion protection devices and equipment that had a very slow burn, because although the directive was made in 1994, it wasn’t fully mandatory until 19, 2003.
Alan: [17:15] So it gave industry nine years to come to terms with that. Now, the legislation didn’t have much detail in it or what there was was confusing and they dumped on the European standards bodies the job of writing detailed technical standards for a whole range of equipment and all sorts of things that hadn’t been standardized before. And I got involved very closely in the work on mechanical standards. So, machinery, which we know creates and its potential ignition source because any high powered machinery has the energy and the potential to create hot surfaces or in fault conditions, big sparks and so on. So we started with a clean sheet of paper in about 1996 to try and write standards for mechanical equipment that created an explosion risk. Other groups started to try and write standards for explosion suppression systems. They started to write standards for explosion vent panels, explosion isolation systems, all the technical means we have to control the risk and the powder handling industries. But that’s been slow progress.
Chris: [18:28] I can imagine with just the amount of knowledge that’s needed to, to develop those. But are those standards all under the Atex umbrella or some under the BSI, the British Standard? Initiatives.
Alan: [18:42] Almost all of them were European and they’ve moved on. No sooner had we finished the mechanical standards and we’re going back to about 2005, something like that. Then the German Din standardization body came up with a proposal to try and turn them into international standards. I think the logic there was, they thought that it would be easier to sell into the Chinese market, something that had an international standard certificate rather than a European standard certificate. And if we made them all international standards, then the German industry would be ready and, and in the forefront to sell into the Chinese market. I think that’s the logic. But it created a whole stream of new work. And this time the meetings weren’t all in Europe, but scattered around, certainly to Malaysia. It took me to Tyldesley. There were meetings in Australia. There were certainly meetings in North America. And they start to take up too much time and cost too much money. So I didn’t go to the far flung meetings, but most of these are now standard under ISO. They come out with ISO 8079 series. There are two standards of that for mechanical equipment, and I suspect there will be more coming along in due course.
Chris: [20:06] Okay. We’ll include some links in the show notes to those different standardized bodies and even some of the standards that we mentioned in this episode, Kind of rewinding a bit, I know there’s also the the danger substance and explosive explosive atmospheres regulations, DSR, which I hear a lot about out of the UK. How does that kind of fit in with the other directives that are used?
Alan: [20:29] Right. There was a recognition within the EU that just because your equipment is safe doesn’t mean to say that your complete process will be safe. You need people to run it properly. You need people to maintain it properly. You need people to design a whole system, not just assume that if you buy a string of bits with the right certificate and put them together, you’ll have a safe plant. So they passed a second Atex directive, which was a user aimed at the end user who made a decision to turn that into dsar regulations. But they’re really all European origin and I don’t think they’ll change any time soon.
Chris: [00:21:15] Okay, so other regions may have adopted those under their own.
Alan: [21:18] You’ll find the same wording in all the other UK, all the other European nations. They will be obliged to turn those into their own regulations. They might be assembled differently, but all the same, all the same requirements will be there. And the objective, as far as the European Union was concerned, is to level the playing field. You don’t want one country to undercut operational standards and then watch industry migrate to people to countries that have low standards to save money, but leave the workers in some countries. More at risk than the better countries. That’s the logic. Whether it works, I’m not so sure.
Chris: [21:59] That’s one of the things I’m trying to figure out with the instant database and how that whole process works together. But that’s a really great overview. And I, I think the audience and the listeners will, will appreciate that kind of breakdown. Can you share in your mind what the differences might be with, say, the North America system for regulation or for providing engineering guidance or how that works? Or is that something that you’ve been involved in?
Alan: [22:25] Well, I’m certainly watching how a lot of guidelines come out of the insurance industry in North America. So Factory Mutual has a whole series of codes, which cover topics which nobody else covers. And they’re and they’re shared very widely. They’re useful. Who else does codes in North America and sources the…
Chris: [22:48] NFPA, National.
Alan: [22:50] NFPA. That’s right. I’m not quite sure I understand the legal status of NFPA codes, but they certainly have codes for things that nobody else has. Belt conveyors are one example. We’ve no European standard for fire protection of belt conveyors. And look to NFPA advice for that.
Chris: [23:11] Okay, that’s good coverage. So would a I guess we’re coming towards the end of the interview and I really appreciate your time. But at a high level, what do you think the best approach might be moving forward as a global community? Is it to identify all these different pieces of equipment and then pick up the standards that are for each one? Like you mentioned, there is no no European approach for the conveyor system, but NFPA does have a conveyor system approach. So it’s sort of combining all those together. Do you have any ideas on where Alan Tilsley sees this should be going over the next 15, 20 years?
Alan: [23:45] I think it’s an endless education. I’m afraid that every new generation of engineers needs to appreciate that. What looks like fairly harmless sawdust, or fairly harmless flour or sugar dust actually is incredibly destructive if you get it wrong. And all too often you can walk around plants and realize that nobody here appreciates the danger. They just don’t have a vision of it. That must be true of some of the incidents. Like the Imperial Sugar where the quantities of dust around were ridiculous.
Chris: [24:19] Yes, and I and I’ve seen that a lot with the Insta database reporting and certainly Imperial Sugar. They had, I want to say, 60 years recorded documentation of facility fires, facility small scale explosions before the catastrophic loss incident that we all know about in the 2000. So it just shows that the workers may become normalized to this if they if they see, you know, if you have a fire one week and they fire in a couple of weeks later and a fire a couple weeks later, but each one of those is really ticking the box for a, for a chance for a catastrophic loss. And you can kind of only go to the, well, so many times on that.
Alan: [24:55] That’s right. Well, I’ve got a booklet that came with my job in HSC that must have been accumulated somewhere along the line 1960s, 1970s, which has a title from US Department of Agriculture Preventing explosions in Grain Elevators an achievable goal, it says on the cover. Well, I think they’re right. It was an achievable goal, but we haven’t achieved it.
Chris: [25:17] I’ll have to get a copy of that and if I can link to it in the show notes, I definitely will. But that sounds like something I’d like to resurface because it’s very close to the goal set that we have with dust safety science.
Alan: [25:27] One of the lines in that that I have often pressed at people is having collected the dust off your grain, you don’t need to put it back in the process, because that’s that just means that some somebody else further down the line has got to separate that dust out again. A lot of people do that. Oh, it’s too expensive to just dump, right? So it may be, but it’s also expensive. If you blow your plant up.
Chris: [25:52] That’s a whole nother topic. But we definitely this time of year, or even, I guess, last month or this kind of time where it’s grain handling season and, and they’re pulling all their agricultural crops, the number of of silo fires, the number of conveyor fires and certainly number of explosions that we’ve seen just over the last couple of months is is much higher than, than any other time of year. And, and it seems to be indicated by this, you know, cleaning the dust out of your grain. If you’re following those procedures, you’re getting the husk out of there as ignition sources. And, and I think we’ll see over the next couple of years, being able to relate that back to, to cleaning your grain in the first place and, and storing it when it’s in a better condition.
Alan: [26:33] I’ll hunt out my copy of this booklet somewhere. It’s fairly buried now, but, yes, it has some, some useful observations, but they’re not new.
Chris: [26:43] Sure. Well. And none of it is. It’s about getting it back out into the world. But, so with that, I just want to say thank you. I think that was a really exceptional interview. And I think the audience will learn a lot. So I want to say thank you again. And, I really appreciate you having you on the podcast.
Alan: [27:02] Glad to be part of that, Chris. And best wishes with future podcasts. You’re doing a good job there.
Chris: [27:08] Thanks. I appreciate it, Alan. Have a great day. Same to you. That was a great interview with Alan. I know that I learned a ton just by talking with him, and I hope that you found that you learned quite a bit as well as I mentioned in last week’s episode. And then again in this week’s episode, our goal for 2019 is to understand combustible dust safety as a worldwide problem and develop worldwide solutions. So we’re really looking at interviewing experts from all over the world, from the United States, North America through to China, Africa, New Zealand, Japan, and the United Kingdom. And really understanding the difficulties and the successes that we’re having as a global community on this problem. So if you know anyone that would like to be interviewed or be included, or if you’d like to be included yourself, you can go to dustsafetyscience.com/podcast and fill out the form there if you have any questions asked by these experts. You can also go to dustsafetyscience.com/ask and ask it there and we’ll bring them on to answer those questions. So thank you again for listening. I look forward to talking next week.
