DSS129: NFPA 660-Upcoming NFPA Changes & What They Mean For Combustible Dust Safety with Jason Krbec, Part 2

Today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast is a continuation of Jason Krbec’s keynote presentation at the 2021 Global Dust Safety Conference. In the last episode, Jason, who is the Engineering Manager at CV Technology, talked about the history of NFPA 660, upcoming NFPA changes and what they mean for combustible dust safety.

Today, he covers how NFPA 660 is being developed, the difference between standards and codes, the structure for NFPA 660, and how the committee is going to be dealing with conflicts between the different standards and engineering guidance documents.

NFPA 660 will be a code and not a standard.

Jason began by explaining that NFPA 660 will be a code and not a standard.

“It’s a working title,” he added. “NFPA 660 Combustible Dust Code is the interim title that’s being referred to.”

As he presented the raw structure of NFPA 660, Jason said that Chapters 1 to 10 are going to be covered by the NFPA 652 Technical Committee.

“Their task will be to manage those chapters and handle public comments and revisions on those chapters. Chapters 11 through 16 are going to address the commodity or industry-specific standards. Chapter 11 covers everything specific to the food and agricultural industry that wouldn’t be considered fundamental or maybe differs from [the fundamentals] for a specific reason. That committee still would be tasked with developing the language in Chapter 11. All the other different industry and commodity-specific standards have their own chapter.”

The various NFPA technical committees are currently reviewing NFPA 652 and identifying what is fundamental and what isn’t from a commodity standpoint. As the process continues, there may be some differences of opinion between the various committees regarding what’s fundamental to them but not others. Eventually, there will be some common language that forms the basis of Chapters 1 to 10. What isn’t fundamental will be broken out and geared towards specific industries in their respective chapters.

At present, if there is a conflict between fundamental and industry-specific requirements, facility owners and operators can choose which one they want to follow. If something isn’t addressed in their commodity-specific standard, they follow the fundamental standards. Jason added that this principle won’t change a lot as the different standards merge.

NFPA 660 will go through four stages of development.

As it develops, NFPA 660 will go through four stages.

Public input: The first draft will be posted so that the public can comment and recommend additions or revisions.
Final version: A second draft is prepared after the public comments are reviewed and the committee votes on any changes.
Notice of intent to make a motion: If anyone has an issue with the final draft, they submit their comments to the NFPA technical committee, which reviews them and votes on them.
Passing to the NFPA Standards Council: The council meets, reviews any of the appeals, and then decides whether to actually issue the code or the standard based on that vote and any of the appeals that were submitted.

“Hopefully, by the end of 2021, an initial draft will be released to go into the formal standards process, and that would start in 2022,” Jason says. “Then in 2023, that final version will be finalized, issued for release, gets into the standard council in 2024 and we would have a new code that covers combustible dust here from North America. If approved, it’s going to replace these existing standards.”

The ‘how-to’ standards’ won’t be incorporated into NFPA 660

When asked whether how-to standards like NFPA 68, 69, and 499 will be incorporated into NFPA 660, Jason replied that they would not.

“Those are going to still be stand-alone standards, because some of those extend past just combustible dust, and are handled by their own technical committees. They will still be independent, and obviously referred to in the 660 code for how-to-do things.”

Conclusion

At the end of the presentation, Jason said that the new standard would contain a lot of improved housekeeping requirements. This is a huge benefit, as many combustible dust incidents are due to poor housekeeping practices.

“Housekeeping is usually the first line of defence against some of these combustible dust incidents, so it’s very important. This will definitely be in the code,” he promised.

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

Tel: 561-318-4051
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-krbec-5304b657/
Website: https://cvtechnology.com/

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.