Industrial Fire Prevention

Workplace Safety Toolkit Workplace Safety Is No Accident An Employer's Online Toolkit to Protect stakeholders. Safety begins with corporate culture. This site is an excellent resource for your plant safety and health program. It contains worksheets, checklists and information on a host of subjects related to health and safety including: Foundational concepts such as Safety Policy, Job Descriptions, Safety Committees. Concepts and Applications about how and why accidents happen, framework for safety culture, OSHA Fact Sheet and checklist, accident analysis and reporting. And other Concerns and Issues such as ADA Compliance, pathogens, building maintenance, confined spaces, construction, drug free workplace, electrical safety, emergency action planning, ergonomics, fleet safety, food safety, hazardous and toxic substances, housekeeping, lockout/tagout, mold and mildew, off site assignments, portable power tools, PPE, security, workplace stress, and workplace violence...

From the Woodworking Network blog, a good article on OSHA press releases in which wood products firms have been cited for serious, repeat and/or willful safety and health violations. What is your corporate safety culture like? Only serious "continuous significant improvement", and benchmarking best engineering practices to your health and safety program will prevent these type OSHA violations and citations.  Ignorance and negligence of current NFPA Standards for combustible dust, dust collection and other safety practices is what causes OSHA to have to police your business. Like Rich in this article, I shake my head every time I read one of these stories or press releases, and it is almost a daily occurrence.  The shame is that many of the events in these stories could have been prevented! My business is in the field of combustible dust, and helping protect process conveying systems, and dust collection systems from fires and explosions. My primary focus is in preven...

So you want to build a biomass plant? - TimberBuySell.com - the portal for timber, logs and woody biomass In this article from TimberBuySell.com, Paul Janz with Ausenco Sandwell in Vancouver, BC gives you a quick overview of all the complexities involved. A Beginners Guide to the Project Development Process With the current emphasis on producing `green energy from biomass and the subsequent government grants and subsidies available to promote the idea, a lot of well-meaning but inexperienced entrepreneurs are promoting the construction of plants that will process biomass into one form or another. There are some basic steps that all projects go through, from concept to start-up, whether the `builder is new to the process or whether it is a company with a well formulated plan for development. Following is a brief description of the project development process.

Dust explosions explained | Characteristics, ignition and effects From the Dust Explosion Info website a great article on characteristics of explosions,  explosion concentrations, ignition of dust clouds, and the effects of explosions. This website is an excellent starting point for those wanting to know more about explosions, the physical characteristics of an explosion, the necessary conditions for an explosion to occur, potential ignition sources, dust explosion statistics, flammability, risk assessment, dust explosion prevention and protection, standards, and hazardous area classification.

Combustible Trust From Material Handling and Logistics and the MHL.com blog, is an interesting piece on why OSHA removed powered industrial trucks from the latest Combustible Dust status report in the rulemaking process. OSHA Should Beware of Combustible Trust Tom Andel September 9th, 2011 That old line about the sliding scale of untruths—lies, damn lies and statistics—is fun to use when someone quotes a number to support their argument. How many times have you read an article that debunks a widely-believed statistic? A few years ago chocolate was bad for you. Too much sugar, caffeine and empty calories. Now the conventional wisdom is that chocolate is good for you. Its antioxidants will help you live to 150. That’s if you don’t get killed in an industrial dust explosion first. That was another popular belief a couple years ago—that lift trucks were involved in many of the combustibe dust violations found by OSHA inspectors. That stat was reported in a statu...

System Safety Skeptic - Lessons Learned "Effective system safety efforts require learning from failure" From Terry Hardy and the "System Safety Skeptic" Blog, an article on the lessons learned from the chemical explosion at the 1999 Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, TN. Lesson Learned: Analyses after accidents often show that clues existed before the mishap occurred. Such clues frequently take the form of anomalies observed during the life cycle of a project. An anomaly is an apparent problem or failure that occurs during verification or operation and affects a system, a subsystem, a process, support equipment, or facilities. Anomaly or problem reporting and corrective action, therefore, can play an important role in system safety analyses. An effective anomaly report and corrective action process not only allows for the reporting of problems, but also implements a closed-loop process for finding and fixing the root cause of a problem. In the case of this accident, ...