In today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast, we go over leading indicators for a combustible dust safety program. This is another topic inspired by a question that came through the Help Desk System. It read as follows:
“Dear Chris, combustible dust is probably the main hazard in our particular sites, and the information that you are consolidating is very interesting and valuable. Would it be possible to send me information on leading indicators or about leading indicators that can be used to measure our performance in terms of prevention?”
This question is extremely encouraging, as it shows that the company wants to take its safety program to the next level and not simply be reactive in its treatment of combustible dust dangers. To answer it, we contacted several combustible dust specialists and consultants and even posted the question on LinkedIn.
What is a Leading Indicator?
The best way to define a leading indicator is to compare it to a lagging indicator, which measures an event after it happens. We use the Combustible Dust Incident Database for this purpose. It measures how many incidents occurred, how many injuries and fatalities, etc. While these insights are useful for measuring historical trends, they don’t address leading indicators such as number of DHAs completed or safety programs installed.
Responses From the Community
The LinkedIn post attracted several responses and recommendations. One of them was to look at indicators already being measured at a facility, such as spark detection systems. You could monitor how often sparks are being detected: if it’s increasing, could a dryer fire system be imminent?
Devices like bearing monitors, temperature monitors, belt alignment sensors, motion sensors, gas monitors, and pressure differential readings in bag houses should all be checked to confirm whether the system is running the way it should. If you’re hearing noises and detecting strange smells, it could be an indication that the system is approaching an unsafe condition.
Another good leading indicator could be the percentage of employees trained on combustible dust safety principles. At your facility, does that mean 10%, 50% or 90% of your employees? Is that number going in a positive or negative direction?
Other potential leading indicators include:
- Number of management change requests
- Number of hot work requests
- Number of areas where Hazardous Area Classification Study has been completed
- Number of routine maintenance inspections that need to be conducted- are any of them overdue?
- Percentage of housekeeping tasks conducted on time or on schedule
For example, if you have a dust spill in the vicinity of an ignition source, an explosion could very easily have occurred. If the only thing that separated what happened from a loss incident is just luck or timing, that really needs to be treated as a near-miss or really as an incident and evaluated as such.
A lot of the time, when we have a large loss, a high damage, or a high injury incident, there was a lead-up to it. Last week, a fire broke out in the dust collector. The system overheated and worked incorrectly in the past, causing many complaints. These are all leading indicators, but they all go down to a road of “We had a large incident.”
Why was that? Well, if we look backwards, we see these lagging indicators come up again: overheating events, thermal events, fires, near-misses. How many times has the operator opened a processing vessel because they’re not sure what’s happening inside that vessel? These are all examples of leading indicators that could indicate the health and safety of your safety program and whether you’re trending towards a large loss or a reportable combustible dust safety incident.
Conclusion
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
Dust Safety Share
LinkedIN
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