DSS215: Incident Update - 2021 Coal Dust Explosion in Baltimore, Maryland (Revisited)

In today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast, we revisit the 2021 coal dust explosion in Baltimore, Maryland. Many of you will likely remember that we covered this explosion in Episode #210. However, when that episode was released, one of our newsletter subscribers sent us some updated information for this incident, shedding further light on what happened and providing information we can use to prevent it from happening again.

In Episode #210, we discussed what the OSHA citations and penalties revealed about what may have occurred in the explosion. Today, we’ll go into more detail about what actually happened. We’ll discuss some of the newly available reports and videos as well as the repercussions that will appear over time.

Incident Summary

This explosion occurred in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 30, 2021. The site was run by a railroad company that operated in the United States and Canada. They were shipping coal material from rail to boat and from boat to rail. It is unclear how the coal was processed on the site and initially there wasn’t much information beyond an explosion reported by local news authorities shortly after 11:30 on December 30th.

Once we saw the OSHA citation and penalties come out, we reopened this incident in the database to try to gather more information about what happened. We also revisited it in Episode #210. There were nine serious OSHA penalties covering seven items and totaled $121,200 in proposed penalties. Unfortunately, there was no narrative published with this citation report, so we had to infer what happened by reviewing the individual citations themselves.

OSHA’s investigation was directed at activities undertaken in the North Tunnel and West Escape Tunnel on December 30th.There were several violations, including:

Not wearing respirators and other protective equipment
No respiratory protection program
No written hazardous area classification document for the tunnel or elsewhere in the coal terminals

According to reports, the tunnel had an electrical control panel, overhead lighting, and outlets and transformers that were not approved for hazardous locations. Neither gas monitoring nor combustible dust monitoring were conducted to determine if a hazardous area existed in the tunnel.

With information being so limited, we still weren’t 100% sure if it was a dust explosion, a gas explosion, or a hybrid mixture explosion. We didn’t know if it was an isolated event in that tunnel or in that area of the transporting facility, or if the explosion propagated elsewhere.

New Information About the Baltimore Coal Dust Explosion

As we mentioned earlier, a newsletter subscriber sent us some videos and news articles.

The videos, which appear in the resources section at the end of these show notes, suggest that there was a long conveyor system with several transfer towers that go from one side. One video shows a large fireball ejecting from one of these transfer towers, and then smoke and coal dust spewing out of the conveyor system upstream or downstream from this coal conveyor.

This explosion was quite large. The dust and smoke that erupted encompassed several hundred feet from where the fireball was ejected in a matter of seconds. It appears there was a large deflagration throughout the entire conveyor system and transfer towers, ejecting a fireball from one end of the system.

Another conclusion that probably can be drawn here is that even if there was, for example, a pure gas explosion in the tunnel under one of these silos, it seems unlikely that the fuel was not combustible dust. It would be unusual, but not impossible, to have gas accumulate along hundreds of feet of conveyor. It is likely that an explosion occurred and propagated throughout this conveyor system, fuelled by coal dust.

There were several news articles published more recently than the OSHA citation report. The first was a news report released August 27, 2022. It discusses the after-effects of the explosion, stating that smoke and debris was ejected from the western side of the plant, in the area known as the North Escape tunnel.

It also mentions a preliminary report released by the company, which suggests that a fireball exited the South service entrance of the North Tower, causing the fire and damage to that transfer tower. It says that the largest of the explosions then occurred in the following locations:

The North Escape tunnel
Vertically from open feeder holes in the North Reclaim Tunnel
The south portal of the North Reclaim Tunnel.

This again suggests that the explosion propagated from one area of this conveyor system into adjacent areas, causing subsequent potential explosions and ejecting this smoke and dusty material up into the atmosphere. They do note in the article that coal dust was detected as far away as 12 blocks and that much of this was focused in the area known as the Curtis Bay neighbourhood. The Maryland Department of Environment issued a pollution violation notice to the company, warning that this incident could result in $125,000 in fines. This would be in addition to the $121,000 in OSHA citations and penalties that we talked about in Episode #210.

The second article that we reviewed was a news report published on January 12, 2023. It stated that there was a settlement between the company and the Maryland Department of Environment in December 2022. The settlement required the company to pay a penalty of $15,000 to the Maryland Department of Energy and also $100,000 to the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that does things like infrastructure building within the community. According to a company spokesperson, the facility was only shut down for a couple of weeks after the explosion and reopened in February 2022.

The third news report was released on October 19th, 2022. It states that a group of Baltimore residents has actually filed a class action lawsuit against the company for a total of $5 million for coal dust and debris, broken windows, and other things that occurred in this community. The suit claims that the company was negligent because of inadequate staffing and failed to comply with permit requirements.

Conclusion

We will provide more updates about this incident as they become available. If any listeners have additional details, please don’t hesitate to send them through to [email protected]. Our goal is to share that information with the community so we can understand the types of hazards out there as well as ways to detect and prevent them so that this type of thing does not happen again.

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.