DSS098: History of the Manufacturing Advisory Group in British Columbia with David Murray

In this episode of the Dust Safety Science Podcast, David Murray, Corporate Safety HR and Environment Manager for Gorman Group and co-chairperson of the Manufacturing Advisory Group (MAG) in British Columbia, returns to talk about how MAG was started and what it has accomplished in the area of combustible dust safety.

During the interview, he answers the following questions:

What is the Manufacturing Advisory Group?
When did it start focusing on combustible dust safety?
What are some of the MAG group’s combustible dust initiatives for this year?

What is the Manufacturing Advisory Group?

MAG is British Columbia’s sawmill employers’ safety group. It consists of safety representatives from sawmills and other wood processing and manufacturing companies, all of them committed to:

Sharing best practices
Safety benchmarking
Undertaking safety projects that will benefit the entire industry

The group is steered by industry CEOs and, during the last five years, its administration has been supported by the BC Forest Safety Council. According to David, approximately 20 different mill companies are members.

When did it start focusing on combustible dust safety?

David explained that MAG’s commitment to best safety practices has always included wood dust control, but the 2012 sawmill explosions in British Columbia resulted in more emphasis on this critical problem. Members started compiling combustible dust programs, procedures, and training. Then they created a Combustible Dust Audit Program, which received the Lieutenant-Governor Safety Innovation Award from Technical Safety BC.

The program established the following:

Comprehensive technical standards for each element being audited
Auditor selection and training criteria
Audit how-to guidelines
Audit logistics model mirroring ISO protocols

Other combustible dust initiatives and projects undertaken by MAG include the Fire Inspection Prevention Initiative (FIPI) with the BC safety regulators and a scientific study through FPInnovations on the analysis of wood dust combustibility.

“We did collaborate and we continue to collaborate with the safety regulators, WorkSafe BC, Technical Safety BC and the Office of the Fire Commissioner on various combustible dust initiatives and improvements,” David says.

What are some of the MAG group’s combustible dust initiatives for this year?

Other current priorities with the MAG outside of combustible dust are COVID safety protocols, safety training enhancements, hazard recognition, and supervisor safety.

“We’ve learned from what we’ve accomplished on lowering the risk of combustible dust in our facilities and tried to expand it with the other sorts of serious injury and fatality risks that are present in our workplaces,” David says.

He confirmed that MAG is striving for an industry-wide adoption of a new safety metric called SIFp, or ‘significant incident failure potential.’ Its purpose is to measure and tally close call events that have potential to cause serious injuries or fatalities.

“This is far removed from our current safety performance metric, which centers around lagging workers’ compensation-related type injury data.”

The whole purpose of SIFp is to pay greater attention to near misses and treat them as though a particular serious injury or fatality risk did actually occur, so that more effort is made to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

“We really find it exciting to drill down into these types of events, treat them differently, collate them, categorize them, and go, “Are these types of events mostly around people entering machinery without properly controlling them from inadvertent movement? Or is there a greater number of events that involve mobile equipment and pedestrian interface, or are there a bunch of minor events related to combustible dust that are telling a facility that you have some gaps in your program that need to be addressed?”

Examples of near misses include:

A wall of horizontal surfaces with combustible fine dust exceeding the ⅛” limit
Dust clouds being created

David warned that simply noticing the hazard and cleaning it up is not sufficient.

“If someone just cleans that up and doesn’t really do a bit of an investigation around how it got missed in the cleanup routine, or how we can make this so that there aren’t horizontal services for this fine dust to land on, you end up having either a loosey goosey result or no result at all.”

Conclusion

David recommended that all facilities adopt a serious risk model for measuring and addressing safety performance.

“That’s critical. Report, investigate, track close calls, minor fire explosions, to understand the risk that is present in a facility or even as an industry if you’re able to get it to that point,” he says.

He added that these facilities need to implement a program that understands and looks out for risks, combustible dust or otherwise and develop a positive relationship with regulators to ensure ongoing compliance.

“Safety associations that support employers and employees, instead of taking a pseudo-regulatory approach, can result in safety improvements. We’ve seen this. It might sound idealistic, but I do believe it is possible.”

If you would like to discuss further, leave your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach David Murray directly:

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-murray-crsp-a1640319/

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.