DSS052: Announcing the 2020 Digital Dust Safety Conference

This episode is exciting for us because we’ve officially been running this podcast for an entire year – 52 weeks. The first episode came out October 23rd, 2018, and this one went live October 29th, 2019. We’ve had over 7000 downloads since we started the show and on average we’re getting more than 150 downloads per episode.

We are also thrilled to announce the 2020 Digital Dust Safety Conference, which will be taking place during the last week of February 2020. We’re bringing in presenters from the research and industry side. The general admission tickets are going on sale a couple of days after the release of this podcast.

DustSafetyScience – A Recap

As we stated above, the podcast has been running for 52 weeks. Dr. Chris Cloney has always said, “I don’t know all the answers, but I’m willing to ask the questions.” That was where the idea of the podcast came about. The goal was to interview experts and identify what was working in their area (and what was not working), and support a cross-collaboration both globally and between industries.

The original DustSafetyScience platform was at MyDustExplosion Research.com, which was a blog that Dr. Cloney created during graduate school. He started it in 2016 and grew it before changing it to DustSafetyScience.com and diving more into the industrial application of combustible dust, because that was where the change was needed.

In 2018, Dr. Cloney defended his PhD thesis. On April 23rd, DustEx Research as a company was born. Its mission was one year of zero fatalities worldwide by 2038. Less than a week later, Dr. Cloney was in Rosemont, Illinois, at the International Powder Show, presenting the whole concept of the plan to use an online platform to reduce loss of property and people in industries handling combustible dust.

During his presentation, Dr. Cloney used a quote by Peter Drucker: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” The whole point of DustSafetyScience was to measure success in combustible dust safety and put systems in place to improve that success over time.

The Big Why

In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek emphasized the importance of having a ‘why.’ For DustSafetyScience, it was to achieve one year with zero fatalities by 2038. This was a goal that had never been reached before, and doing so needed the following questions to be answered.

What is causing the largest loss of life in these industries?
What is causing these issues to happen?
How can we pinpoint them?

This is where we started with the company and why we’re doing all this in the first place, which also motivates what we will be doing the next 52 months. We want to make it possible for workers to go home safe. When they don’t, it’s tragic.

In 1992 in Nova Scotia, the Westray coal mine explosion killed workers and devastated that community. A few years ago, the Didion Milling explosion killed five people in Cambria, Wisconsin. Imperial Sugar and West Pharmaceutical are also examples of large-scale explosions that had a tremendous impact on the lives of the workers, their families and their community. These outcomes go beyond numbers alone, which is why we’re doing this.

How Are We Doing This?

At the International Powder Show, Dr. Cloney identified four pillars for accomplishing his safety goals:

Awareness: Make people aware of the hazards.
Knowledge: Educate them on what has to be done.
Connection: Connect them to the right people for services and equipment.
Change: Be a voice for change and advocate implementation of policies and procedures that can prevent explosions from happening.

Since then, the DustSafetyScience.com platform has grown. We now have around 50,000 visitors a year and 110,000 page views. A lot of people are coming through, reading material, and, hopefully, becoming more aware of combustible dust hazards.

The combustible dust incident database is our measuring stick and tracking platform. We’ve uploaded hundreds of incidents to that system, providing a huge amount of data that we can comb through and generate lessons learned.

We also have the DustSafetyScience podcast, which has received 7,000 downloads and the industry directory, which features experts who can perform key services such as equipment installation, dust hazard analyses, and go/no go testing for combustible dust.

We’ve done a lot to spread awareness, share knowledge, and educate people, but a lot more needs to be done, which is why we’re launching the Digital Dust Safety Conference.

The Digital Dust Safety Conference

This a four-day online conference will bring the top industry professionals, experts and researchers all together in one place.

The first two days will be focused on industry training that answers the following questions:

How do you do a dust hazard analysis and identify what hazards might be present in your facility?
How do you design systems for fugitive dust containment, capture and collection?
What’s the correct way to implement prevention or protection measures? What are the different regulation landscapes?

The next two days will be dedicated to research, with students, professors, and industry researchers presenting on leading-edge topics.

There will be around 60 or 70 presentations, and one ticket grants admission for all four days. You can pick and choose what tracks and presentations are most relevant to you. We’re going to record them all and make them available on the platform for at least six months afterwards, so that you have access to the full suite of presentations.

The event is on a new Web site platform we created called Dust Safety Academy (DustSafetyAcademy.com). Moving forward, this will become a small community. You’ll be able to create a personalized profile and direct-message any of the other participants in the Dust Safety Academy system. We will also have a community forum to discuss all kinds of topics involving research, industry training, investigations, and what’s going on around the world.

The conference portal is within the DSA platform. You’ll have access to one location with links to all the presentations as they happen. There will also be an exhibition area for equipment and service providers and media companies.

We’re currently working on the conference program, which will be posted at DustSafetyScience.com/DDSC. You can go there to learn more about pricing and other information. We’re also doing a bunch of exciting competitions and giveaways that you won’t want to miss!

Conclusion

Dr. Cloney and the team at DustSafetyScience would like to thank you for the last 52 weeks. We are all eager to keep this podcast going for another year and hope to see all of you at the Digital Dust Safety Conference in February 2020.

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.