Today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast features a replay of the opening keynote from the 2021 Dust Safety Conference. Titled ‘Combustible Dust Safety: Open Challenges and Charting a Path Forward’ and presented by Dr. Chris Cloney, it highlights the challenges that we face as a community and what we can do to tackle them moving forward.
We will replay this presentation over two episodes. In this one, Dr. Cloney reviews the Dust Safety Conference before talking about two big challenges: response to dust fires and verifying incidents.
Combustible Dust Safety: Open Challenges and Charting a Path Forward
Dr. Cloney started the presentation by emphasizing the vision of Dust Safety Science: to bring everyone (end users, consultants, engineers, regulators, etc.) under one roof to improve safety in industries handling combustible dust. Then he illustrated one of the biggest reasons why our platform exists by telling the story of Tammy Miser, whose brother, Shawn Boone, was killed in the 2003 aluminum dust explosions at Hayes Lemmerz in Indiana.
Tammy’s loss shows the impact of combustible dust explosions. They affect the workers, their families, and company, and the community. By working together, we can all fight to reduce loss in industries handling combustible dust.
Challenge #1: Response to Dust Fires
The first of the two open challenges addressed in this episode is response to dust fires.
Prior to the explosion that killed Shawn Boone, there had been a fire in a fume hood at Hayes Lemmerz. Believing that the fire had been put out, workers restarted the equipment, which was when the explosions occurred. We see this a lot: response to dust fires, either during the response or after the response, actually leads to an explosion that causes loss of life.
One of the Dust Safety Science working groups specifically addresses this issue by releasing our incident reports every six months. As Peter Drucker put it, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” These reports are our measuring stick for what’s happening across the globe.
Since we started this task in 2016, we are recording an average of 266 fires, 76 explosions, 126 injuries and 15 fatalities every year strictly related to combustible dust. We’re probably catching most of the events that reach the papers in the United States and Canada, but there are many incidents across the globe that have less coverage, which poses challenges.
Takeaways from the incident reporting include:
- The number of industries exposed to combustible dust hazards is larger than you might think. One in 10 U.S. workers are employed at facilities that generate or handle combustible dust. Over 50% of these are small to medium-sized businesses.
- Given the sheer number of materials, industries, and operating processes that handle combustible dust, it’s difficult to create a regulation or standard. Difficult- but not impossible.
- More fatalities and injuries result from explosions than fires, although fire accounts for more property loss. However, we need to have an integrated process to protect people and property from both.
- In the United States, we are seeing a dust fire on average every two or three days and a dust explosion that’s large enough to make the local news about every 10 days.
- In 2020, the number of incidents, injuries, and fatalities decreased overall, but we’re concerned that as the pandemic ends and operations resume, the numbers will climb back up.
- Silos and elevators have the highest proportion of fatal dust explosions: around one in 10 silo explosions and one in 13 grain elevator explosions result in a fatality.
We really need to work towards improving safety in industries handling combustible dust. If the only thing that stopped a near miss from being a fatal incident was luck, then treat it like a fatal incident. If things get brushed off due to luck, they’re bound to happen again.
The first working group that we’re creating is in this response to those fires. If you have input, you can go to DustSafetyShare.com and provide it anonymously or leave your email, whichever you choose. If you want to join that working group, leave a note at DustSafetyShare.com and say you want to be involved.
Challenge #2: Verifying Incidents
One quote that appears in the Chemical Safety Board’s Dust Hazard Learning Review states:
“Currently data on the number of explosions, fires and near misses due to combustible dust is unreliable and surely underreported due to the perceived liability of end-users and sharing this information with outside groups. The creation of a reliable reporting system, even if it means that reports are anonymous, would be a huge step in helping the industry to fully define the problem and work together on a solution.”
This is the thought process behind our global incident reporting network, which is our second global working group. How do we verify incidents? How do we get better international coverage? How do we enhance the information that we get? How can we quantify this effect of under-reporting? These are all challenges that we’ll be tackling with that working group.
We have groups like Purdue University and Kansas State University, US Chemical Safety Board, Dust Safety Science, and groups in Sweden and Japan that are tracking combustible dust incidents in different ways. How do we come together to create one common systematic framework where we can share information? How do we effectively communicate it to the end-users, experts, and equipment providers to improve these industries? This is the big topic around that working group.
Conclusion
If you didn’t attend the conference, you can go to Dust SafetyAcademy.com. It’s free to join there, although we also offer a premium membership that includes access to the 2022 Conference that we’ll be having, as well as over one hundred training videos that we’ve done to date.
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
Dust Safety Professionals
DustSafetyShare.com
Incidents
Hayes Lemmerz Dust Explosions
Organizations
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