DSS152: North America Loss History

From our Friends at: Dust Safety Science   

In this episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast, we’re talking about dust explosion loss history in North America. In the last episode, we explored some of the earliest resources and regulations from North America to illustrate several interesting points about combustible dust. Today, we’re moving into loss history, with an emphasis on North America.

Why is Understanding Loss History Important?

Why is it important to understand loss history? The most important thing is to not forget what we already know. If you’re not learning from the past, you tend to repeat it. For example, we had a sugar and cocoa standard in 1924, but fires and explosions are still occurring in these facilities today. That’s one of the biggest reasons why understanding and keeping track of loss history is really important. 

So what loss history information is actually available in North America? There are six sources we’ll be reviewing in this episode:

• In 1957, the National Fire Protection Association released a report of important dust explosions in the United States and Canada since 1860. 
• In 2006, the US Chemical Safety Board published its investigation report, the “Combustible Dust Hazards Study”, which covered explosions in general industry from 1980 to 2006. 
• In 2018, the CSB released an update covering 2006 to 2017.
• The U.S. Bureau of Mines has its own database covering mining accidents that weren’t captured by the NFPA report or the CSB reports. 
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Grain and Feed Association (NFGA), and several other groups involved with the grain industry do a great job of tracking incidents through detailed reports.
• The Dust Safety Science combustible dust incident database. 

These incidents are covered in multiple places, as you can see. One of the reasons we brought all of these together is to have a central place where we can start to understand and track things in a manner that crosses all industries and countries.

What are Some of the Challenges in Tracking Loss History?

What are some of the challenges of tracking this information? One is that the information is available through dozens of different documents and databases. NFPA and the Chemical Safety Board have attempted to consolidate some of the information, but everything else, especially in other parts of the world, is in a bunch of different databases. Putting it all together can be a big challenge. 

The second challenge is that there are overlaps and gaps in reporting. The Chemical Safety Board may report an incident as being part of general industry while another organization may identify it as a grain handling industry incident. Occasionally, an industry may not be covered at all. Think about waste treatment and other industries that may not be captured in these areas. 

The third challenge is that there’s an inconsistent approach to reporting across the board. In some cases, they only report incidents that involve injuries and fatalities. In other cases, there is a much lower bar to reporting. 

The fourth challenge is that consolidated reports usually aren’t available until years after the incidents occurred. As a result of recency bias, you attach a lot more importance to what happened last week than to what happened last year, which is much more important than what happened 10 years ago.

The combustible dust incident database is our solution to some of these problems. We’re tracking incidents soon after they happen and validating them the best we can, which yields a lot of useful insights while keeping the issue of combustible dust safety front and center.

North American Loss History- an Overview

How many dust explosions were occurring in the first half of the century? The NFPA report on important dust explosions in the U.S. and Canada stated that since 1900, the organization received reports of 1,085 dust explosions. In these explosions, 640 were killed, 1,712 were injured, and property damage totaled $97,811,678. These totals covered a wide range of industries. 

Agricultural incidents are covered in three resources:

• The USDA Task Force Report entitled “Grain Dust Explosions, An Unsolved Problem” published in the late 1970s
• The reporting done at Kansas State University by Professor Robert Schoeff from 1977 to 2005
• The reporting released by Dr. Kingsley Ambrose for 2006 to the current date. 

According to the USDA Task Force report, which covered 1958 to 1976, there was an average of eight grain elevator explosions per year, resulting in 15 injuries and six fatalities. In 1977 and 1978, there was a tremendous uptick in serious grain elevator explosions: in a one-month period,  from December 1977 to January 1978, five explosions took the lives of 62 people and injured 53 others.

Between 1975 and 1988, there was an average of 20 explosions, 35 injuries and 11 fatalities per year in these agricultural industries. This increase led to the development of what is now the OSHA Grain Handling Standard being developed.

With the U.S. Chemical Safety Board reports, the first one covers 1980 to 2006 and the second one covers 2006 to 2017. The earlier report gives a figure of 11 explosions, 27  injuries and 4.5 fatalities per year, and the later report presents nine explosions, 25 injuries and five fatalities per year. 

There does not appear to be a dust explosion database that covers all of Canada, but since 2016, when we began tracking them, Dust Safety Science has recorded an average of four explosions and four injuries a year.

Conclusion

It’s interesting to note that the Dust Safety Science incident reporting, which covers 2016 to today, tallies closely with the historical data. We’re seeing 30 explosions, 30 to 35  injuries and two or three fatalities per year, and with the worst year being six fatalities in total. Although things may not be getting worse, they don’t appear to be improving greatly either, and that needs to change.

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.