In today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast, Cherie Whelan, Director of SAFE Companies with the BC Forest Safety Council presents strategies for identifying and implementing critical controls in wood pellet facilities.
Before taking on her current role, Cherie was an Occupational Health and Safety Investigator with the Government of Alberta, an EHS Investigator with Suncor, and Total Safety Governance Leader with Transalta. Today, as Director of SAFE Companies with the BC Forest Safety Council, she plans and delivers SAFE Companies and COR Certification programs for more than 3000 employers in the province.
BC Forest Safety Council has a sole purpose: preventing injuries and fatalities in the industries it supports.
The BC Forest Safety Council is the health and safety association for forest harvesting. According to Cherie, its sole purpose is to prevent injuries and fatalities in the sectors that it supports, such as wood product manufacturing and pellet industries in BC.
“We have a number of different advisory groups that basically represent different sectors within the forest industry,” she says. “For example, we’ve got the Coast Harvest Advisory Group that represents a lot of the harvesting activities up and down the coast. We’ve got a Trucking Advisory Group for log truck drivers and more that supports the interior. We’ve also got a Fallers Group as well as Silviculture.”
Cherie works specifically with the Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC) Safety Committee and the Manufacturing Advisory Group (MAG), which developed its own combustible dust audit before it joined the BC Forest Safety Council. One group she supports at WPAC is the Manufacturing Technical Working Group, which is part of the Workers’ Compensation Enforcement Review.
Critical controls began when WorkSafeBC started integrating process safety into high-hazard industries.
Around four years ago, WorkSafeBC started integrating process safety into high-hazard industries. They use bowtie, which is a risk assessment model, and provided workshops that explained what bowtie was and how it could help them identify catastrophic events in progress.
“It was great in the workshops – we’ve got a skilled facilitator in working it out,” Cherie recalls. “But when it came down to actually doing the work back at the plants with limited resources, it became very evident that it was way more complex and time-consuming than those companies anticipated.”
WorkSafeBC responded by reaching out to WPAC and BC Forest Safety Council to see if there was anything that they could do to support the members. A project team called Total Safety Management was put together to help them implement controls to prevent catastrophic incidents as well as manage such events if they occur.
“What we wanted to do was develop a set of industry bowties,” Cherie says. “[What it consisted of] was going through a facility and doing a bow tie, which is identifying the hazards and the threats that could cause that event and then also identifying the consequences. For each one of those threats or consequences, we identified the controls that need to be in place and the degradation factors that could impact those controls.”
The team started by working with two facilities to do industry bow ties on fire and explosive hazards in hammer mills, bed dryers, baghouses and silo storage. Each bowtie had to be validated, which means:
- They confirm whether a threat exists
- If the answer is yes, they review what controls they have available for it. If it is a control that has already been identified, it makes it a little bit easier for them. However, sometimes they have to add new ones.
Once they go through this validation process at the site-by-site level, they have identified their controls for those hazards as part of that industry bowtie. The next step is to decide who will take ownership of them in the organization.
“What we’re seeing early on is that they’re helping to identify gaps that they didn’t even know [they had] up to this point, and filling in those gaps as they go,” Cherie explains.
Wood pellet facilities are identifying safety gaps they never realized they had.
According to Cherie, the validation process is not a “cut and paste exercise.” In addition to threats that have been identified, new ones may be discovered after examining earlier incidents or near misses. Every site is unique, and the project is always evolving.
“In addition to the boots on the ground stuff that we’re offering, we’re also going to be providing some videos and guides on how to complete the validation process and what-not,” she says. “So that once we’re done, there is also help. Right now I would say we’re at the launch phase of the project with making the resources available for those sites.”
She confirmed that the project is already seeing results.
“We have had our first two employers send in their submission requirements to WorkSafeBC, which is, as I said earlier, their completed bowties for their specific sites, along with those critical control summaries for each of the critical controls identified through that. So that was a big win and a big milestone.”
Conclusion
“For me, a big part of process safety is lessons learned,” Cherie says. “You’ve got to have thorough investigations that are going to get at the root cause and then share those lessons. By doing and sharing best practices and how we’re managing these controls, there’s a lot of power in this.”
If you would like to discuss further, leave your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach Cherie Whelan directly:
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherie-whelan-a909895b/
Website: https://www.bcforestsafe.org/
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
Organizations
Wood Pellet Association of Canada
WorkSafeBC
BC Forest Safety Council
Programs
SAFE Companies and COR Certification programs
Publications
Health And Safety Critical Control Management Good Practice Guide
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