Center stage at the International Powder Show; I was pretty nervous…
It has been almost a year since I took the stage in Chicago on April 26, 2018. In my presentation, I talked about the goal of DustEx Research, the goal of myself and our team, to see a year with zero fatalities from dust explosions by 2038.
How are we going to achieve this? By building a connected global community to increase awareness, share knowledge, and advocate change in industries handling combustible dust. How are we going to measure our results? By building the world’s first global tracking platform for dust fires and explosions.
But in that moment, we were just getting started on this journey. DustEx Research was incorporated literally nine days before the conference. The DustSafetyScience.com platform had only been online for a matter of weeks. This report and the current status of the incident database, are due to tremendous effort and support since that time. Nine months in, DustSafetyScience.com has 500+ recorded incidents and, in January 2019, we had over 4000 visitors from more than 75 countries. We also launched a weekly podcast where we interview experts to figure out what challenges the community is facing. At the time of writing, 20 episodes have been released with more than 1700 downloads.
Unfortunately, we did not see a year with zero fatalities in 2018. We also struggle with obtaining accurate information, have difficulties with underreporting of severe incidents, and se challenges with getting global coverage. However, the early success and substantial feedback from our community (over 2000 emails to date!) show us that we are on the right track with our work. I hope you find this incident report interesting, insightful, and useful in your work.
As always, I appreciate your support and the effort you are putting into making industries handling combustible dust safer around the world.
With kindness,
Chris
P.S. Have feedback on the incident reporting? Email me at [email protected]
Download the 2018 Year-End Combustible Dust Incident Report