Today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast revisits Dr. Chris Cloney’s appearance on ‘3 Things That You Should Do Now To Avoid A Combustible Dust Event,’ hosted by Jordan Newton at SonicAire Systems. In addition to sharing his insights on the subject, Dr. Cloney answered questions from listeners.
Jordan Newton: Hello and welcome to “3 Things That You Should Do Now To Avoid A Combustible Dust Event” brought to you by SonicAire. I know we’ve got people joining us from all around the world this morning. We’ve got folks all over North America and Europe, and we are so excited that you are here with us.
I’m Jordan Newton. I’m the Chief Operating Officer at SonicAire and I’ll be your host today. I want to let you know that as we’re talking if you have any questions, make sure to pop them into the Q&A section. You should have a button there at the bottom of the screen that you can open that up and type them in. We’ll answer as many as we can as time allows, and anything that we can’t cover in our session today, we’ll be sure to respond to you individually and make sure we get those questions answered.
Well, today I’m talking with Dr. Chris Cloney, founder of Dust Safety Science and the host of the Dust Safety Science podcast. Welcome, Chris.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Jordan, really excited to be here and really talk to you. Really excited to talk to you and the group that you have on here today.
Jordan Newton: Thanks. Yeah, Chris and I have worked together and collaborated on a few things, and haven’t really had time to just sit down and dialogue about safety and dust. So I’m looking forward to our session today.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, me as well.
Jordan Newton: All right. So tell us a little bit about Dust Safety Science. What is it? What do you want people to know about it, and what’s currently going on with you and your team?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Our company is DustEx Research Ltd., but the platforms most people will see us on are Dust Safety Science, Dust Safety Academy and Dust Safety Professionals. The whole group of platforms was around an idea about combustible dust I had while doing my Ph.D. research. So I started about a decade ago in 2011-2012, looking at the physics and chemistry of dust explosions, travelling around the world, talking to researchers, looking at really small scale laminar dust flames and people going out in outer space and rockets, and doing aluminum dust investigations in laboratories – there’s probably a hundred around the world, blowing up stuff in these small, triangular little spheres.
It was really interesting, I loved it. I love combustion science. I love explosion research. I was very interested in explosion, detonation, and blast physics. But when I came to the industrial application side and said, “Okay, well, what are we doing here as researchers?” I quickly realized that there’s this big disconnect. I’d be at these events talking to people about this really interesting science. But there’s nobody from industry there. Then I go to Powder and Bulks Solids in Chicago where there would be a massive array of industries, and there would be no scientists there.
I started looking around, [thinking] “Okay, well, who else is missing?” Okay, well, the regulators have a big role to play. Are they here? Well, not really. They’re doing their own thing and they have a thousand tasks to do and only 10 people to do it. The process safety specialists were there as well, but they’re having difficulties connecting with the industry. Basically, it’s a disparate group of people involved in combustible dust.
That’s really where the genesis of things like the podcast came from- to say, “Okay, well, how can we start closing these gaps? How can we better understand safety? Get these groups to communicate.” It’s just been one gap after another with these platforms, identifying what we’re doing through the independent research that we create and then saying, “Okay, how do we close that gap? How do we increase safety in combustible dust handling industries?”
Jordan Newton: Sure. I know I heard a quote yesterday that [went] “Someone who knows what to do and how to do it will always have a job. But someone who knows the why will always have authority, and not just know how to do things but have authority in that space.”
I think you’ve spoken to your why a little bit behind that. So I appreciate you expanding on that and sharing that with us. All right, so let’s jump right into combustible dust.
What’s the big deal, what’s the big issue? Why is combustible dust such a critical element of safety? Why do regulators care, and why should we care?
Dr. Chris Cloney: There’s a really famous or infamous term that the Chemical Safety Board used to describe combustible dust. I believe they called it a latent hazard. A hazard that just sits around and nobody thinks too much about it until something bad happens. That word will come to me later in this interview and I’ll say what it is. The thing that sits around, and when it does go wrong, it can be devastating. But when it’s not, then it seems pretty innocuous or doesn’t really hurt a whole lot.
There are some terminology issues that we have as a community. Dust is a good example – the same stuff that’s on my dresser here. We’re talking about housekeeping so we’re cleaning little fluffy things. It’s very inconspicuous- that can be a hazard. But it turns out that when you look at it with a critical eye, it is quite a big hazard in terms of fires, flash fires and deflagrations, and explosions.
That’s like the latent issue behind everything: it seems relatively safe. As you look at this situation with a critical eye, you realize that quite a few people are hurt by it every year. We have an incident database that tracks globally. Since 2016, we have logged over a thousand incidents. In the U.S. there are 30 major dust explosions every year – they are generally ones that are large enough to make the local news.
There are about 30 injuries a year and we see anywhere from one to five fatalities a year on average. Every seven to 10 years, there’s a really bad year where you have a whole lot more. That’s where the big spikes in awareness and the big spikes in pressure come from.
Those are two things. It’s a real challenge in industry that is causing loss. We talked about life and limb, but it causes a lot of property loss, a lot of product loss as well, a lot of downtime. It’s this latent hazard that just kicks around and does nothing until it does something. Then it’s really disparate. There’s a whole lot of materials that can be involved, a whole lot of equipment that can be involved, and a whole lot of processes that can happen, that could cause loss. To wrap your head around it can be quite difficult.
I’d say that there are a couple of people in the world who wrap their heads around all of it. Most people have their own little chunk that they understand and they develop and they work from. So those are three things: really hard to wrap your head around – very disparate, causes real loss in industry, and this latent hazard just kicks around until something bad happens. So we forget that it’s bad until these things happen.
Jordan Newton: Yeah, it’s that sleeping giant, right? it’s complex and it’s dangerous, for sure. Okay, so if I’m a plant manager, if I’m a facility operator, or an EHS manager, what are the most important things I should do to avoid a combustible dust event? What are some things I can do now? Let’s talk about those three things.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, so I try to pick out three that I thought would be really helpful for people to take away today. The three that I came up with were:
- Onsite facility assessment – generally, here you’re looking for explosion hazards outside of equipment.
- Dust hazard analysis, which is a more extensive review in that you start looking inside equipment, and looking at fire, flash fire and explosion hazards.
- Emergency pre-planning, in particular a safer response to fires and thermal events.
Those are the three key areas. So get somebody in and at least get an eye on your system and see where you’re at. Do this comprehensive dust hazard analysis – we’re going to talk about that. Then, one of the major avenues of loss that we see is a thermal event – something gets hot, something is smoking, some gas builds up in a piece of equipment because of some combustion or even non-combustion event. You have an open fire and those are all mechanisms that can escalate and cause a large explosion.
Jordan Newton: Yeah. So let’s talk about that assessment and the explosions outside of equipment. What should we be looking for? Where do we begin? Where do we even get started on something like that?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Generally, some people might say you should just start right with a dust hazard analysis, and maybe some people should. There are facilities out there that don’t know whether or not they fall under NFPA 652, the Fundamentals of Combustible Dust. There are facilities out there that aren’t necessarily at the stage to take full action on dust hazard analysis but we still want them to have safer operations. So these are some of the cases where a facility assessment comes in.
I think there are really three key things you’re looking for in an assessment:
- Where’s the fuel?
- Is there fuel available for a fire or explosion?
- Where are the ignition sources? Are they available for fires or explosions?
You’re also looking at screening testing. If you want to go down the route of NFPA 652 in understanding if that applies, then you can get our material tested. Then we can opt-in and just say, “Yes, the second-step DHA is needed.” A lot of times companies want to know whether or not that’s a need, and that’s where your screening test comes in.
Jordan Newton: Yeah, and I thought that was the case. Yeah, people can just say “We’re not sure if it’s combustible or not, but everybody in our industry treats it like combustible dust. So chances are it’s combustible.” They can just skip right over that testing step and just go “We’re dealing with combustible dust. Let’s take it head-on, right?” They can choose that route.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Exactly. I’m not sure of the exact verbiage in NFPA 652, but it basically says you can use historical data to opt-in. But there’s a caution there. Don’t use historical data unless you’re really sure. There’s funny wording there on your explosion protection equipment. If you’re wrong, you may undersize your vents or have inappropriate timings on your fire extinguishing systems or your explosion suppression systems. Those things come in there.
Jordan Newton: We definitely want to be careful not to use that historical data to opt-out, right? You can’t opt-out with that, but you can opt-in.
Dr. Chris Cloney: We’re really trying to avoid false negatives in the dust hazard analysis process if you actually need to identify those hazards – because then you’re going to find out the hard way when you have a fire.
Jordan Newton: Yeah. Okay, so we’ve identified fuel ignition and then testing. So I’ve got to ask- I was at a trade show recently and I got asked, “Who are some testing labs you’ve worked with or where do I go for that?” I actually had one of my colleagues who was there with me say, “Hey, shouldn’t they check out Chris’s website?” I said, “Oh, that’s the best resource. That’s the best place to go.” So if I ask you today, Chris- “I don’t know where to begin to get testing. Where can I go to find a reputable testing laboratory?” Where can we go for that?
Dr. Chris Cloney: That’s the whole reason we created Dust Safety Professionals as a platform because we kept getting that question over and over again. It’s like “Okay, well, let’s systematize this and get all the testing houses on board.”
Through Dust Safety Professionals, we have member companies from Canada, through the U.S., to Asia, to Europe, to India. So wherever you are in the world, go to Dust Safety Professionals. You can look at the list we have there or just put in a request and say, “Hey, Dust Safety Professionals team, I need help with this.”
We get that quite a bit. It could be a steel manufacturer that comes in to say, “Hey, you’ve gotta figure this out. We’ve got to do a DHA and well, we don’t really know if this applies.” So they go to Dust Safety Professionals, enter the information, and then we work with them and say, “Okay, well, you’re not really at the testing stage yet. Maybe you need a consultant to come and do a facility assessment.” The nice thing about most facility assessments is they can roll into a DHA, generally.
DHA is a multi-day process. Day 1 is generally the assessment anyway. So if you’re working with a good consultant, and we have many of them in Dust Safety Professionals, they’ll be able to do a dual quote. So if you do your testing and it turns out “Hey, this doesn’t apply,” then they’ll help you with your AHJs a lot of time to understand that there are no hazards there. If they do go down the road of doing a full dust hazard analysis, that will contribute towards it.
Jordan Newton: So you mentioned a term that I’m familiar with, but some of our folks who are watching today may not be as familiar with. You mentioned AHJ. So can you elaborate on that? Who is that typically? When we talk about AHJ, who exactly are we talking about in most cases?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yes, the ‘easy to say but hard to define’ AHJ. It’s really a catch-all term that industry has put together to capture a lot of people. One way to think about it is that anyone who has the power to shut you down is an AHJ.
They take many forms, so it can be your local fire marshal, it can be your local building code enforcement agent, it could be the person who has to sign off on your site plans. It can be your insurance. If you can’t operate without insurance, then your insurance is AHJ. More commonly, you might see an OSHA official being named as your authority having jurisdiction. Those are some of the different ones that you might be looking at.
When we get requests through Dust Safety Professionals, it’s generally because local authority or building officials come in and say “Hey, you need to do this.” If they’re already going to trade shows and they’re immersed in combustible dust, they probably already know that they need to go to step two already. So their AHJs might not be their local jurisdiction – they’re already past that stage. They need to move ahead.
Jordan Newton: All right. Step one, identify the fuel, identify those ignition points, and look for a testing resource to find out if your dust actually is combustible. All right. Anything else on explosions outside of the equipment? Just in that outside environment?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, I want to give a framework for people to think about it. One of the ways you’ll hear it explained is ‘Contain, collect, clean’ – so the 3 Cs.
A lot of companies start with clean. So every time there is dust, we clean it up, and that can be a good strategy. It’s generally not the most efficient strategy. It’s better to say “How can we keep this dust inside the equipment?” So if you have leaks, if you have improper equipment design, those are all ways that containment of that dust inside equipment can be a challenge.
There are ways to fix that: better equipment design, better conveyor system design. Generally, you see conveyors that drop just from one to another, and that causes the dust cloud, and that dust then migrates. We can design that to become a scoop and spoon – different design avenues so you get laminar powder over that conveyor and you don’t get that dust kicking up. You can add in wadding depending on the industry, or you can add in like solvents to keep your dust levels down. There are lots of ways to contain that dust in the powder stream or to contain it inside the equipment.
In feed, maybe you want to screen that dust out before it even hits your facility. Maybe you only want to buy corn that’s been pre-screened so they don’t have that dust that’s coming out. There’s a lot of stuff you can take on containment – they’re going to really make it easier to clean at the end of the day.
Jordan Newton: Yeah. What about filtration and maintenance? I get asked about that occasionally. My understanding is that, over time, if you don’t do proper maintenance of your filter system, the performance is going to degrade. Is that something you have experience with or something that falls into this “contain” category here?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, it’s really the second piece – collect. If you can’t contain the equipment, then you want to collect it at your transfer points, generally. There’s this local dentist I hear on the radio, and every morning he plays the same thing, a drama. He says in his happy-go-lucky voice, “You don’t need to take care of all your teeth, just the ones you want to keep.” It’s like you don’t take care of all your dust collection equipment, just the ones you want to function well.
So generally, if it’s abrasive material, it can be sticky. If there’s powder involved, efficiency is going to degrade over time in a dust collection system. They do need maintenance, they do need upkeep. In some circumstances, they can also be a challenge too – because they’ve added in a lot of the elements needed for a dust explosion. These are inherent in a dust collection equipment.
Often, containing can be a better strategy. Not always so. I mean, there are other cases where dust collection is superbly working. If you’ve got a dust collector and there’s dust all around it or all around the pick-up points, then you’re probably not really maximizing your efficiency with dust. It should be capturing, I don’t know what the magic number is- let’s say somewhere between 70 and 95% of the material that’s coming through it. The good designers would probably say about 90% percent. If you’re not capturing everything with the dust collection equipment, it’s not designed or kept going very well.
Jordan Newton: So that 25% or 10% or whatever that escapes, that’s what we call fugitive dust. So I think that’s where the “clean” comes in, and so let’s talk about that a little bit.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, so that’s the third C – so contain, collect, clean. So for cleaning, you really want to get that out of your facility in a safe manner. The traditional method to do that might be just to blow it down to the ground and sweep it up. It turns out that that was causing more incidents than it was saving at the end of the day because you’re creating a dust cloud in the vicinity of employees. So that’s really frowned upon, and really can only be done as per NFPA under very specific circumstances that are generally more onerous than using other cleaning methods.
So you really want to add a frequency that’s going to keep the level of dust below hazardous levels – clean out material. The thing that I like about the SonicAire fan systems is that they take care of that for you in some of the most dangerous places. So the dust that gets fugitive and wafts up really high is generally the driest. It’s also generally the smallest particle size. Those are the two parameters that affect dust combustibility the most. So that’s like the dangerous dust is up above people’s heads up in these rafters. So when you have an event, that gets rained down and the SonicAire systems are there to stop that from happening, to keep that below, off that equipment.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Most people clean when it gets above the hazardous threshold. Like you’re waiting for a hazard to happen right before you clean, so these systems are going all the time in not letting that happen. it just always struck me because there’s always going to be that balance of “Okay, well, should we shut down the plant and clean today?” Or if there’s always a production rush – and there is always a production rush, right? – it’s always going to be “Okay, well, let’s just wait a little bit longer. Let’s schedule once a quarter instead of once a month or whatever.”
You’re always spending 25% or 50% of your time or more in hazardous conditions if you’re a facility that’s even doing that. Yeah, there’s a bunch under “clean” to do it safely. I really like the role that SonicAire plays in that because I think it’s a novel approach and one that’s really useful for that.
Jordan Newton: Sure. Thanks, Chris. All right. Any final thoughts on explosions and problems outside of the equipment before we move on into the equipment?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, I’ll just say two things. So one, if you have questions while you’re listening to this, put those in the Q & A box and we’re going to have a section at the end of the presentation to talk about that.
Number two is if you just don’t know what to do, that’s why we created Dust Safety Professionals. It’s okay to go in there and say “My name is John. I don’t know what to do.” Somebody said this, and that is the exact reason that we created DSP. It’s like “How do we get that person to move towards safety?” That’s great. Go to DSP and put it in there. Use a Gmail account if you want and don’t put in your name. We can have a dialogue and figure it out and connect you with the right people – these companies that are working with the materials and stuff.
Jordan Newton: Excellent. Okay, all right. Let’s talk about inside the equipment – where do we go from there?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Just for the sake of adding another geometric shape to the already geometric shape-filled slide deck for combustible dust, let’s talk about the Dust Safety Hexagon. So if you imagine 6 sides: it’s contain-collect-clean, and the other side is prevent-protect-isolate. You can do prevention, protection and isolation outside equipment. But generally, you’re talking about then doing that inside equipment as the other side of the Dust Safety hexagon, if you will. Because of the very broad knowledge needed to evaluate these hazards, it can be quite difficult. I’ll give you some examples.
One is Imperial Sugar: clogged silo leads to an explosion, propagates through ducts, flows on the floor, lethal dust raining down, full facility loss, loss of life – catastrophic big event. We have other events where it’s just a bucket elevator: explosion propagates through, zips open and injures employees. I see someone on the call who I personally talked to about an incident that his team witnessed where it’s just a bag dump station. They’ve done a thousand bag dumps before, and one day, whatever the reason – they’ve emptied quicker or the charges built up on the bags or whatever – ignited and engulfed the workers. So we have, like, very disparate sizes and scales, very disparate materials so it can be quite a challenge to wrap your head around all the different hazards of combustible dust.
You might say, “Well, wouldn’t it be great if we had a systematic way to do that?” That is what NFPA 652 is trying to provide to us, the end-users of the code: a systematic way to walk through and figure out those hazards, The terminology used in NFPA 652 is a dust hazard analysis. This will include hazards outside equipment, but also includes the hazards inside the equipment. That’s really the next step after you have done your screening and said “Okay” or opted in and said “Yes, we have combustible dust. What do we need to do here?” It’s walking through an understanding with that dust hazard analysis.
Jordan Newton: Yeah. So again, I don’t know what to do. It’s the first time I’m hearing about a dust hazard analysis. Or I’ve heard about them in maybe industry meetings and things like that. Where do I begin? How do I get started doing a dust hazard analysis? It sounds complicated. How does that work?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Well, in concept it’s easy to say. There’s a nice flow chart. I’m going off memory so forgive me if I forget a step, but screen your materials, opt-in or opt-out, do your material characterization, understand the fire flash fire hazards of those materials, walk through each part of your facility and say “Where are the fire, flash fire and explosion hazards?,” identify what loss they might cause, and identify any gaps between your prescriptive requirements outlined in whatever standard set you’re using.
Generally, people use NFPA 652 as the umbrella for all other NFPA standards. You could be stacking it against your own internal standards or some international standard as well. But that’s identifying the gaps between where you’re at and those prescriptive requirements, developing an implementation plan to close those gaps, and then any specific concerns for your industry and management systems – of which there are a lot of them.
We talked about housekeeping already. It is one of the management systems. There are also employee training and emergency response preparedness, which we’ll talk about in a second. There are another eight or nine that are listed in NFPA 652. It was like a very systematic way of saying “Okay, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5 to evaluate all the hazards at your facility.”
Jordan Newton: Sure. I think there’s a template for a DHA in the appendix of NFPA 652, isn’t that right?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, there is.
Jordan Newton: Yeah. So if you’re not familiar with that. NFPA.org you can go there and register, and view a copy of NFPA 652 there and take a look at the appendix. There’s a template there that you can download or print off or create your own, and work through that. Then, Chris, you have resources available as well. If people say “I’m not into that- it’s really complicated. Can I just hire somebody, a consultant to come in and help us do that?” You’ve got resources for that as well, right?
Dr. Chris Cloney: There are a couple of things there. So the appendix in NFPA 652 is a really good reference. There’s another book called “Guidelines for Combustible Dust Hazard Analysis” published by the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). That’s a really good reference, too. They actually talk about hazards outside equipment, inside equipment – the frame we’ve been talking about here. They have very good walkthrough examples as well.
So those are the places you go. The biggest challenge today with DHAs is who can do them and who actually grants the power to people to be able to do them? The answer, no one – sort of. The AHJ has the final say, but generally, the AHJ doesn’t have the understanding to say if you’re competent to be able to do a DHA or not. So there are avenues where you could train employees yourself to do a functioning DHA. Then there are avenues where it’s better to hire somebody. Now it does make sense to talk about those sorts of things. It is something we put a lot of brain space into at Dust Safety Science, figuring out who we want to call a qualified person for the sake of Dust Safety Professionals.
Jordan Newton: I think the standard does say “competent” – I think is what they try to define there.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah. So we really see it as three things. So this is the Dust Safety Science, Dust Safety Professional’s version of it. This is something that I presented at NFPA’s Conference this year.
You need three components to be a qualified person in my view. Again, this isn’t the NFPA view, it’s nobody else’s view but ours. But at least it’s something to put out there.
You need a broad understanding and experience of combustible dust hazards, a specific understanding of the equipment and materials you’re working in, and a demonstrable experience performing or leading DHAs in the past. The reason you need these three things is that if you work in feed and grain for a long time, that’s great. Maybe you know some stuff about DHAs but if you don’t know combustible dust fundamentals, you’re going to miss stuff when you evaluate the hazards.
If you studied combustible dust, you did the courses from NFPA, and maybe you even work in feed and grain, should you do a DHA on the newest nano titanium metal printer? Well, probably not. You don’t have that specific material or industry experience. Maybe you have both those things but if you have never done a DHA, you’re going to miss some of the frameworks, some of the steps.
So then the question really becomes: how do we hire somebody who has these three things? Or how do we develop somebody on our team who has these three things? I’d encourage that to be the first question before it’s like “Okay, who can find the checklist and do the DA here?” I would stop and say, “Well, okay, how do we develop somebody as a qualified person?”
What you’ll probably find is if you have one site and you’re doing it one time, it’s probably going to be cheaper to hire somebody external rather than to train somebody. If you have multiple sites or if you have a lot of change processes and you want to come back and re-evaluate DHA over time, then train somebody up. But you need to walk through the steps of making them a qualified person because you’re going to miss things otherwise.
Jordan Newton: Sure. All right. I don’t want to run out of time before we get to these three bullet points here, for sure. But pre-planning and responses to fires and thermal events- unpack that for us a little bit.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, so let’s talk about it. We talked about hazards inside equipment, outside equipment, facility assessments, dust hazard analysis. That’s a lot of the stuff you’re going to see when you Google “How do I deal with combustible dust?” Well, if you Google that, you’ll probably come up with one of our platforms. That’s why we created them.
But yeah, we run this incident database, and every year we record almost a hundred, probably even more than a hundred, actually a thousand over five years. So we’re averaging 150 to 200 per year.
One of the big things that comes up that’s not addressed is this response to fires. The question is like “What is a fire?” Is a fire a big flaming thing that we see or could it be black flecks in our output stream? So we actually created a working group at our conference last year and said “Okay, who wants to tackle this problem?” We got a team of eight people together. We’ve been working on it for about six months, and it’ll probably take us another six months to get the final report and stuff together. But it’s about identifying the common factors associated with loss from fires and thermal events. The framework is “prepare, recognize, respond and recover”. So if you just don’t recognize you have a thermal event, that often will escalate to an explosion.
There’s a current Chemical Safety Board investigation going on at, I think the town’s called Belle. I can’t remember what state it is in, but they haven’t released the report. They released an update and they said, “Okay, before the incident happened, there were black flecks noticed in the output. That’s what I mean by “recognize.” Is that a thermal event? How can that lead to an explosion?
Jordan Newton: You’re really talking about the warning signs, the precursors. It’s a near miss. That’s a primary event that hasn’t led to that catastrophic secondary event yet. So how do we address that and make that a priority so that we never have that secondary catastrophic event?
Dr. Chris Cloney: We recognize it. How do we respond in a safer way? How do we recover? So “respond” – Do we have sprinklers? They’re going to kick in and land on burning hot metal dust and cause an explosion. Or employees trained with fire extinguishers and maybe kick that up and cause an explosion of the facility, and then recover when you turn it back on. Okay, is that hammer mill clean enough? it turns out that when you turn it back on, there’s still a smouldering mass in there, and they’re pulled through the conveying system and you have explosive flows inside your building.
The working group pulled out, I think, 80 incidents of exactly those cases, and those are real things. They’re not “maybes,” they’re cases that caused loss for not recognizing, not responding in a safe manner or recovering. It all points back to “Okay, how do we prepare for these thermal events and fire events in a better way? How do we train our employees to recognize, respond and recover?”
So I don’t have the steps for that yet, other than start thinking about your emergency preparedness. What are you calling an emergency? Do people run towards the issue? Do they run away from the issue? When do you call the fire department, and what are they wearing when they run? What are they wearing? Are they wearing regular suits? They don’t fare too well in thermal flash fires. Are they wearing regular clothes? Also, don’t dust particles get trapped underneath the clothes and cause really bad burns? Yes.
There’s a whole branch of that, and it’s not well documented. There’s guidance between a bunch of different stakeholders and that sole purpose is working to pull together and say, “Okay, where should people go to try to figure this out?” So that’s the third thing- just start thinking about your emergency planning, how you deal with fires and thermal events.
Jordan Newton: Excellent. All right. We’ve got a couple of questions that have popped in here. So you mentioned reviewing the DHAs. So how often should that be done? Is that identified in the standard? Is that a rule of thumb? Is that just general practice? What should be the accepted review cycle for the DHA?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yes, that’s a good question. Let me just pull up because I am using NFPA LiNK now. If you’re a regular code user, you should look at it. It’s like the cost of one code document a year. It’s really good. It’s just really that much better than flipping through paper copies.
So in terms of the general requirements, I think it’s every five years or sooner, depending on the changes that you’re doing in your facility. That’s the keynote- if you’re making changes, if you’re adding parts of your facility, you really need to have that being a living, breathing document to move forward with.
Jordan Newton: Yeah, go ahead. All right. Here’s an interesting question. So how do I convince upper-level management to spend money on dust controls and dust mitigation?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, great question. It’s like the million-dollar question. I say it’s all good for me to get up here and say as an independent researcher that we should do it to save lives and limbs. That’s true. That’s why lives come to work. But does that move the needle on safety? Historically, maybe it hasn’t. So we do need to get better at what we’re effectively calling “selling safety” at the moment because I have no better name for it.
I would encourage you, if you’re in a position or have that influence, start to document the true cost of what’s going on. I’ve seen this to be successful with health and safety managers where you ask, well, how much did it cost you last year to have fires, flash fires, explosions, and you don’t know the answer because it generally gets pulled into just operating expenses. It doesn’t get broken out into the fire that burned up your bags and your dust collector. That USD $20,000 or USD $80,000 loss or whatever it is, just went under operating expenses. So you can sort it. It’s going to take some work on your end, but you start tracking that on your own or if you get support, say “Hey, we should track this.”
You’ll see that there is actually a cost associated with non-improvement of your safety system – from hard costs, replacing equipment, from downtime, from employee injury to employee compensation payments. After doing that for a year, then you can go to your management and say, “Hey, we lost USD $150,000 or U $SD1.5M or USD $15,000 on replacement due to fires and flash fires and downtime from ‘small deflagrations.’
They’re going to go,”Well, holy smokes. Fix that.” “Well, okay, here’s a USD $20,000 investment that we can make and we think we can reduce that by 75% or something.” That’s the process I’ve been recommending, and I have seen success in some industries where health safety managers can do that.
If you have input or questions or feedback, send them to Jordan on that specific thing. I’d love to bounce ideas off other people who are in that position to say “Hey, what are some other ways you can sell safety?” Sometimes you’ll try to pull that off X operating expenses and give you a denominator to actually measure the performance of your safety system against. Because right now, if the denominator is zero, then right, then you can’t. Actually, it’s infinity. That doesn’t make sense. You need something to measure against.
Jordan Newton: Yeah, it’s how much risk are you comfortable with, and what insurance in the form of dust control and dust protection can you put in place to protect the loss of life and limb? not only that but protect against the loss of production or the catastrophic devastation of your facility or something like that as well.
Dr. Chris Cloney: The point I want to hit on is most of the time when you have a large facility or even a small facility fire, there’s a history there. The question is how much that history cost them over the last five years if they had recognized the cost. Maybe we could prevent it by putting something in.
We’ve done this a couple of times on the podcast. I’ve done episodes tracking a company over time and watched them track themselves out of business by burning up bags, by injuries. Not by causing fatalities because then they become exposed in the media.
That’s a whole other thing. They actually, because of unsafe acts, end up going out of business because of loss of competitiveness, because of the local community suing them because their plant smells because they burn up their rubber. All these things happen and cause these challenges.
Jordan Newton: Yeah. All right. I think we are almost out of time. So just real quick: hit those three points one more time. Just summarize those for us before we get out of here.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah. Onsite facility assessment is generally the first step unless you know you need to or unless you’re asking to do a DHA. Then you can do your screening test to move forward or just opt-in. If you have questions about that, just contact somebody to say “Hey, what does this look like?” Generally, they’re going to be looking at hazards outside of equipment.
We didn’t really talk a lot about ignition sources, but that’s one part they’ll look at. Where is the fuel? Where’s the dust at? Dust hazard analysis then extends that to hazards inside equipment and more of a holistic view, more comprehensive view. There’s also your emergency response plan, and there’s a whole bunch of avenues to that, and I think there’s actually an NFPA standard on it.
The big one where we’re seeing a lot of lost time is a thermal event that is occurring. During the recognition, response or recovery of that event, it gets escalated to an explosion. At least a quarter, maybe up to half of the larger ones we’re seeing have this leading indicator. During the hours or minutes leading up to the explosion, there was a fire or a thermal event going on that if recognized, responded to appropriately, or recovered from would have stopped it from happening.
Jordan Newton: There’s a warning sign there somewhere.
Dr. Chris Cloney: It is every 5 years for DHAs as per NFPA 652 -7.1.4.
Insidious. I just thought of the word – insidious. The Chemical Safety Board said it’s an insidious hazard. if you look at insidious in the Webster dictionary, the definition is that it sits around and does nothing until it does something bad.
Jordan Newton: It’s the sleeping giant. Let’s just call it the sleeping giant.
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, you got it.
Jordan Newton: All right, Chris, I can’t thank you enough for coming on today. I’ve learned a lot. This has been very helpful for me. As I know, as I’m out at trade shows and facilities and talking with people, I know this. These are important tips and pieces of information that people can go out and start doing something. I think that’s the first step – just be active, do something. Don’t just say, “Oh, that was some great information and throw it in a file.” But actually take this information out and do something with it to make your facility a little bit safer for you and your employees and your co-workers. So. Chris, thanks for coming on. If people want to learn more about Dust Safety Science, where should they go?
Dr. Chris Cloney: Yeah, if you’re listening to this, you might just like listening to people’s voices, or maybe you just want to tune in to see me or Jordan. If that’s true, if you listen to things in your car like podcasts or in the gym while working out or walking or whatever, join the Dust Safety Science podcast. We have over a hundred hours of me and other people talking about combustible dust- everything from survivor stories to large loss investigations to every little nook and cranny of the research universe. That’s one area to go.
If you want to know more in terms of knowledge and education, the Dust Safety Academy is the place to go. We have a thousand members there today, people who are trying to increase their understanding of combustible dust. If you need help, if you don’t know where to start, go to Dust Safety Professionals and we’ll get you rolling with your dust safety program. We have experts all over the world, from Malaysia to Japan to the UK to Scotland in place. We’re trying to collect them all up at Dust Safety Professionals and say, “Okay, well, this is how we get you moving on your next steps.”
Jordan Newton: Chris is on LinkedIn and very active. So if you’re on LinkedIn, follow Chris there. You can follow me there. I’m Jordan Newton. If you want more information on specifically fugitive dust solutions, check us out at SonicAre.com or email us at [email protected]. Thank you for attending and listening with us today.
Conclusion
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Resources mentioned
Dust Safety Science
Combustible Dust Incident Database
Dust Safety Science Podcast
Questions from the Community
Dust Safety Academy
Dust Safety Professionals
Companies
SonicAire Systems
Standards
NFPA 652
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