Executive Mindset
Leading Healthy Providing a safe workplace
Dangerous Dust Under the right conditions, industrial dust by-products can pose a deadly danger By Jason Dehart
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t’s no joke. Dust is dangerous and not to be taken lightly. In fact, it can be downright deadly under certain conditions and circumstances, according to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). Many industries that produce combustible dust involve the processing of food (candy, sugar, spice, starch, flour, feed), grain, tobacco, plastics, wood, paper, pulp, rubber, furniture, textiles, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, dyes, coal, metals (aluminum, chromium, iron, magnesium, titanium and zinc) and fossil fuel power generation. And some of them can be found in Northwest Florida. So far, there have been no cataclysmic events here. But it pays to learn from past incidents involving “combustible dust,” the factors involved in dust-related explosions and what OSHA is doing to prevent these kinds of accidents from happening. According to OSHA, dust explosions in Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky and Indiana caused 25 deaths, many injuries and substantial property loss between 1999 and 2003. A natural gas explosion followed by a secondary explosion of disturbed coal dust killed six and seriously injured 14 at a Michigan power plant in 1999. In May 2002, highly combustible rubber dust ignited at a rubber manufacturing plant in Vicksburg, Miss. The resulting explosion injured 11 employees, five of whom later died from severe burns.
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october – November 2013
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In January 2003, an explosion and fire destroyed the West Pharmaceutical Services plant in Kinston, N.C., killing six and injuring dozens of others. The plant produced rubber stoppers and other medical supplies. The culprit in this case was the ignition of fine plastic powder, which had built up above a suspended ceiling over a work area. An explosion and fire at CTA Acoustics in Corbin, Ky., in February 2003 killed seven people. The plant produced automotive fiberglass insulation, and the resin involved was a phenolic binder used in producing fiberglass mats. Another 2003 explosion led to three employees being severely burned (one fatally) during a series of explosions at the Hayes Lemmerz manufacturing plant in Huntington, Ind. Cast aluminum automotive wheels are made here, and the explosions were fueled by accumulated aluminum dust — a combustible by-product of the production process. More recently, in 2008, the Imperial Sugar plant in Port Wentworth, Ga., blew up and burned when sugar dust ignited, killing 14 and leaving many other employees seriously injured. In 2010, three workers were killed in a titanium dust explosion in West Virginia. Those are just a part of the casualty list caused by combustible dust accidents. In an attempt to determine the extent of the