Industrial Fire Prevention

This story is an example of a process that manufactures "fuel", a wood pellet operation, and how critical it is to provide hazard analysis and the right engineering and administrative controls to help prevent fires and explosions. The proper safety systems can help protect processes that produce combustible dust from loss of production, injury, life safety, business continuity, OSHA fines, reputation in the industry and community, as well as the mental and emotional well being of employees. The video below shows smoke from the storage silo, and the fire chief describes how an ember was allegedly created in a pelletizer, and was conveyed to the pellet cooler, where fire traveled from the cooler to the dust collector, and silo.  This is a common fire and explosion scenario in the pellet manufacturing process. From Woodworking network.   Wood Pellet Maker Settles OSHA ComDust Complaint By Rich Christianson | 11/29/2012 2:25:00 PM ...

Recent Recycling Plant Explosions In reference to combustible dust and in the wake of recent recycling plant fires and explosions, we need to increase awareness of combustible dust hazards in the recycling process industry. We have protected many types of recycling plants in many industries. Many forms of recycling plants including paper, wood, rubber, aluminum, lead, even batteries and tires, etc. often create combustible dust as a byproduct, similar to their parent primary manufacturing processes. We have even helped protect military installations where they were grinding everything from paperwork to munitions! However the recycling industry can be as, or even more hazardous because of the nature of the byproducts from recycling, as well as the creation of sparks from fractioning recycled materials. Of course any time you have fugitive dust it is typically conveyed to a dust collector containing the comdust and oxygen, two of the three main ingredients to the fire...