Industrial Fire Prevention

A textbook example of a flash fire, explosion, secondary explosion, and criminal negligence from the Sarnia Observer. "the amount of dust in the air made it impossible to see from one end of the shop to the other." Trial continues Monday Fireball set off explosion in Veolia shop By Neil Bowen , Sarnia Observer Wednesday, July 12, 2017 6:47:10 EDT PM  Sarnia court A fireball from an explosion in a dust collector set off another explosion inside a Sarnia shop during a 2014 incident that killed one worker and injured others. Veolia Environmental Services and a company manager, Anthony Lavoratore, were charged with criminal negligence following the Oct. 25, 2014 fire and explosion that killed 37-year-old Jason Miller. Miller was one of six men injured. He died days later in hospital. Charges were laid in 2015 and the trial began du...

From ISHN Behavior-based safety has been practiced since the Ford Motor Company used it to increase seat belt usage in 1970s. Controversy has dogged it ever since, especially in the 1980s and 1990s when the BBS bandwagon attracted a small army of consultants. Organized labor and worker rights activists protested long and loud that BBS was nothing more than a blame the worker tactic. Thousands of businesses spent millions of dollars implementing BBS programs because they believed it was a way to involve workers in their own safety and it was “the next new thing” in safety. On Wednesday, June 23, a plenary session at ASSE’s Safety 2017 drew between 4,000 and 5,000 attendees to a spirited discussion on “BBS at cross roads.” What puts BBS at a cross roads in 2017? It’s the rising popularity of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), called by some the anti-BBS initiative. HOP holds that human error is inevitable and should be expected. The organization of work ...

From ISHN On Thursday, June 22, Dr. Tim Ludwig drew an audience of 500 attendees at ASSE’s Safety 2017 to his presentation on stopping the ever-popular blame game as a safety practice and instead striving for a better understanding of human behavior. According to Dr. Ludwig, a professor at Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, if you want to “turn the lights off on your safety culture ” go and blame the worker. By going on the offensive and pointing out that injuries are their fault, a learning moment is lost, Dr. Ludwig said. It’s better to use the incident to learn from behavioral science how to find the true root cause of human behaviors, he said. There is still much relevance and much to be gained from behavioral science, said Dr. Ludwig, who also consults globally as the Safety-Doc. Says Dr. Ludwig: “Our human tendencies result in interactions that hurt the safety of our workers and the effectiveness of the systems we put in place to protect them. One ...