Today marks the 100th episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast. As we review the past two years, we’re proud to see how far we’ve come. There are over 60 hours of interviews, solo shows, and educational material about combustible dust safety. Since starting the podcast 100 episodes ago, we have had over 16,000 downloads. We’re averaging 200 downloads a week now, with the most popular episodes reaching the 250 range.
In this episode, we’ll review the content of our very first podcast, talk about what we’ve done over these last two years, and reveal where we’re headed from here.
Welcome to Episode 1!
Below is a transcript of the inaugural episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast.
Welcome to the first episode of the Dust Safety Science Podcast, where we’re looking at driving awareness, knowledge, connection, and change, and the safe handling of combustible dust and powdered material. This podcast is for facility owners, plant managers, health and safety specialists, consultants, equipment manufacturers, and researchers all working in industries either manufacturing, handling, or transporting combustible dust materials.
I’m your show host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In this introductory episode, we’ll go through the purpose of the podcast, why we felt the need to start creating it, a little bit of my background, and we’ll talk about what Dust Safety Science is. The website that we’re running this podcast from is DustSafetyScience.com, so we’ll talk about that. What can you expect from the episodes? What kind of material will we be delivering, and what kind of value will you be seeing? Then, at the end, we’ll talk about how you can get involved, how you can get on the show as a guest, how you can contribute questions, or just to guide the overall direction of where we’re going with this work.
As I mentioned, my name is Dr. Chris Cloney. I’m director and lead researcher at DustEx Research Limited, a company with a worldwide focus on increasing awareness of combustible dust hazards and reducing personal and financial loss from fires and explosion incidents around the world.
I completed my PhD from 2011 to 2018 looking at combustible dust, specifically flame propagation and deflagration in hybrid mixtures of coal dust and methane gas. I also spent five years as a research engineer looking at explosion detonation and blasts and the effects on structures, ships, and personnel in different facilities.
In 2016, I started writing online about the scientific aspects of combustible dust. Why dust mixtures can propagate a flame, what the fire and explosion hazards involved are, protection methods, all in the back of my PhD research, and then throughout the following two years we started doing incident reporting. We were working towards how we generate lessons learned from these explosions and fires as they occur around the world.
In mid-2018, after completing my PhD thesis defense and graduating from my work there, I launched the combustible dust incident database with the goal of tracking combustible dust fires and explosions around the world. You can find this database and use it to search up materials that you’re using in your industries or particular equipment that you’re working with at dustsafetyscience.com/database.
I want to talk a bit now about why I felt the need to start this podcast in the first place and why we moved from writing online articles to creating Dust Safety Science. Through writing the online articles, I connected with a lot of groups, a lot of stakeholders within industries handling combustible dust.
I generally broke these into four categories; researchers, regulators, the process industry themselves, and safety professionals. I was always asking, “Well, what struggles are you having? What issues are you running into getting facilities to be safe at the end of the day?” Researchers do a good job of creating new technology, new engineering principles, but then they have a hard time communicating that out to the broader combustible dust safety community. Regulators feel like they don’t have the resources they need all the time to do their jobs, to get out and ensure compliance. The process industries themselves want to know, “What do we need to do to stay compliant, and even more of that, to keep our people safe?”
The professionals are really our boots on the ground, trying to implement these processes and procedures to try to improve safety in the different facilities that they’re visiting. A lot of time, they’ll run into the biggest and most common complaint or a question, which is “It’s been this way for 20 years and we’ve never had a problem, so what is there to change?”
After running into these different challenges and thinking about it, I decided to do what I call an expert opinion roundup piece or a roundup article of combustible dust experts around the world. In this article, I sent two questions to almost 60 individuals from several different countries.
The two questions were, “What is the number one problem facing industries handling combustible dust?” and “What is the number one difficulty in dust fire and explosion research?” From this article, we had 30 responses from 12 different countries, 20-plus industry experts, 8 universities, and a combined total, I think, of over 550 years experience in process safety handling.
I’ll put the show notes up for each episode. You can access the show notes through dustsafetyscience.com slash the episode number. So this is episode number one, so it would be dustsafetyscience.com/1. In those show notes, I’ll put a link through to this expert opinion roundup. This is a really great piece of research if you’re interested in knowing what difficulties people are having in the same industries as yours around the world.
From this work, we divided the responses into four different categories; those that dealt with awareness, those that dealt with knowledge, those that dealt with connection, and those that dealt with change. A lot of people came back and said the number one issue is just this awareness part. I go into a facility where I’m talking -I’m a health and safety manager- and I’m talking with my line manager and I really have to convince them that there is even a potential hazard with combustible dust.
I get emails almost every week now from various regions of the world asking, “Okay, I’m handling powdered yeast or I’m handling sugar dust or I’m handling this material. We’ve never had an issue, but is there a hazard there?” I have to respond and say, “Yes, there is a potential fire and explosion hazard, and these are the steps you should take to figure that out.” That awareness piece is really the first part that a lot of those responses came back with.
The second was knowledge. Now that people are aware of the combustible hazard, how bad could it be or how do we go beyond just being compliant in our process safety systems and come up with an engineered solution that will keep people safe? That’s really the second pillar of the responses that came back.
The third pillar is this connection part. This is becoming more and more prevalent as we have this drive to do things like dust hazard analysis within the United States. The question is, “Well, who do I go to? Who’s the reliable source of information in this space to be able to do this sort of analysis?” Otherwise, in other countries, they may have, say, regulatory programs that are not as robust as in the United States or other countries in the world, and they may be looking for guidance. “How do we launch out a dust safety initiative looking at, for example, storage silo safety in grain handling industries? And who do we connect with to figure that process out?”
The last pillar, the last column that I got from these responses was on change. A lot of companies want to comply and they know that there are compliance issues, but then the question is, “How do we comply? Who do we go to to figure out what compliance means? And at the end of the day, how do we go beyond that and get buy-in in our facility to keep our people safe at the end of the day?”
I have a good quote from the roundup. It is from Dr. Paul Amyotte: “This is as much a social science/management problem as it is a natural science and engineering problem.” I’ve really taken that tack in this work. That led to the definition of this safety science concept. We went from combustible dust research to dustsafetyscience.com. That’s the name of this podcast as well.
For me, safety science is really the vertex, if you will, if you think of a Venn diagram between three areas. The first is engineering technology, and this is what my original research was in. But it also includes regulation and best practices and how those overlap with engineering technology, and then a third component, which is human behavior and risk perception. Again, I’ve been here 20 years and we’ve never had that problem.
I shared a story in a recent presentation I gave with Powder & Bulk Solids. That was the great London Beer Flood of 1814. This happened right down the street from the Dominion Theatre, so right a few blocks away from where the British Museum stands today in the middle of Central London. What happened was that an over-20 foot tall fermentation vat ruptured. One of the metal rings around the outside of the vat had broken, and that vat ruptured releasing, at the end of the day, over a million liters of beer into the streets of London. This acted as a tidal wave. It broke out the wall of the facility, took down several houses, and resulted in several fatalities and injuries, as well as economic issues, obviously, if you have that much beer flowing through the streets. The main point here is that the shopkeeper survived.
In an interview, he said that three times a year for the 18 years that he had been at that facility, they had had one of these rings break with no ill effects: nobody being injured, no large-scale effects. After 18 years, three times a year, a ring broke and caused this catastrophic incident. This goes to show some of the issues you can have with risk perception around these high-severity but low-frequency incidents. We see this a lot in the combustible dust world as well, especially at facilities that may have fires quite routinely. Again, things happen two or three times a year for several years, and it’s only on that 40th or 50th fire that you may have a catastrophic incident.
I want to talk now about what you can expect from the podcast episodes themselves. The episodes will be around 20 to 30 minutes long. We’re shooting for 25 for each. They’ll take one of a couple different formats. The first format is solo shows like this one where we will be covering particular topics relevant to combustible dust safety. This could be regulation issues, the latest research and technology, basic concepts to advanced concepts, and episodes where we’re looking at individual incident investigations. In a couple of the ones that we have coming up, we’ll look at Chemical Safety Board reports where they went in on some large-scale incidents and really dug into the details of why they occurred and made recommendations. We’ll cover that in some of the solo shows.
We’ll also have a number of interview shows where we’ll talk to experts from around the world who are heavily involved with either design of explosion products, explosion safety products, or fire protection and prevention products, as well as consultants- people who are involved and really have a high degree of knowledge of combustible risk hazards.
On the other side, we’re also looking to interview plant managers and safety and health managers and see what difficulties they may be running into, as well experts from different areas. They could be from grain milling, they could be from automotive sectors, and other different areas that are relevant in handling combustible dust. We’ll try to also talk to regulators: people who are going in and ensuring compliance in these facilities and understand the difficulties that they’re running into and some of the strengths that they’re seeing as well.
The last group of shows that we’ll be doing involve questions from the community. Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn (and you can get a link to connect with me there in the show notes) will notice that every week we try to do a question from the community, and we’re going to extend this to this show as well. Some questions that we’ve tackled on LinkedIn over the last few weeks include “Do asbestos-containing materials typically involve combustible dust, and do we have a concern there when we’re demoing a facility that may have that material? What are the different dust explosion hazards in the automotive sector? What are hazards involved with painting vehicles?” Also, we’ve looked at what condition hazards are related to different conveyor system designs? Say, when the bearings are inside of an enclosure around the conveyor outside and how to do temperature measurement and that sort of thing.
We’re going to take questions from the community. If you want to provide a question, you can go to dustsafetyscience.com/ask. That’s slash A-S-K. If you go there, you can type in your question and get answered here on the show. If we can’t find the answer through our research channels, then we’ll bring on an expert to talk about that topic.
That’s it on the shorter introductory episode showing you what’s going to be involved with the Dust Safety Science Podcast and what kind of material you can expect over the next months and weeks to come. We haven’t figured out what order the episodes are going to come out in yet, but we will be covering the US Chemical Safety Board incident report and recommendations from the Imperial Sugar Refinery. We’ll be talking with a health and safety manager at a wood processing facility about a specific incident they had and processes they put in place to reduce the chance of that type of fire happening again. We’ll also talk to an explosion safety expert on dust collector safety in a program that was put in place here in the province of Nova Scotia to audit and fix a lot of deficiencies that they found around the province.
If you would like to get involved and be an interviewee on the podcast, you can go to dustsafetyscience.com/podcast, and there will be a link to do that there. If you want to go to the show notes for this particular episode, you can go to, again, dustsafetyscience.com/1, and that will take you to this episode. If you want to do us a favor, you can go to iTunes, or whatever device you are using to listen to this podcast, and rate and review. That will help us get more people in from the process safety world and help the audience for the podcast grow. With that, I just want to say thank you for listening, and I’m really looking forward to helping make this a great resource in the combustible dust safety venue.
We’ve come a long way…
The topics we discussed in Episode #1 have really guided the development of the platforms that we’ve created over time.
Where awareness is concerned, the Dust Safety Science website is a key component. We’ve had over 100,000 visitors in the last two years and 200,000 pages viewed. A detailed incident report comes out every six months. Since we started incident reporting, we’ve recorded 762 fires, 270 explosions, 446 injuries, and 51 fatalities in industries handling combustible dust around the world.
This research has enabled us to identify key safety challenges. Many of them concern knowledge and awareness. People assume that because an incident has yet to happen at their facility, it likely never will. There are also response issues: many explosions have been triggered during response to the fire, either by the worker or by firefighters or first responders as they come in.
Difficulties continue in keeping small facilities safe, especially if they don’t have the understanding or expertise to deal with or manage the combustible dust safety issues that they may be facing. Some owners and operators state that they lack the financial resources to implement fire and explosion safety measures. At Dust Safety Science, we’re showing that this is not the case and protection can be both practical and affordable.
… And we’re going further!
We are pleased to confirm that we are re-releasing the Dust Safety Academy, which is really built on the back of the last Digital Dust Safety Conference. Moving through the latter quarter of 2020 and into 2021, our goal is to develop it further as a knowledge platform.
The Dust Safety Academy will feature two different tiers:
- A free tier to get the resources needed out into the broader dust safety community. It will include the discussion forum, Ask an Expert helpdesk, learning modules, and industry-specific documents and guidelines.
- A paid tier that includes courses and course modules for intermediate and advanced topics on combustible dust safety, as well as the educational library, which already has over 60 hours of training material from the last conference and our live trainings.
We will also be:
- Running our global summit on combustible dust safety again next year, in February 2021. The most recent information on that is at ddsc.com.
- Launching our dustsafetyprofessionals.com website. When a company or facility owner or operator needs assistance with something like a dust safety management program or hazardous area classification, they’re not sure who to go to. Dustsafetyprofessionals.com will be a place where you can find the providers you need.
- Organizing the Dust Safety Foundation to support families and communities suffering loss from dust fires and explosions, as well as fund research into combustible dust safety.
Conclusion
The entire team at Dust Safety Science would like to thank everyone for listening to this podcast and supporting our mission. With your help, we will realize our goal of seeing a year with zero fatalities rom combustible dust explosions by 2038.
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.
Resources mentioned
Dust Safety Science
Combustible Dust Incident Database
Dust Safety Science Podcast
Questions from the Community
Dust Safety Academy
Digital Dust Safety Conference 2024
Dust Safety Professionals
Previous Podcasts
DSS001: Introduction to the Dust Safety Science Podcast
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