The danger of combustible dust

This month, 75 people were killed and 185 others injured after an explosion ripped through a metal products factory in China's eastern Jiangsu Province. The culprit? Dust.

Tiny metal particles and metal dust are byproducts of the manufacturing process, and a cloud of them requires only a spark to explode - which in turn can loft more dust and cause more explosions. According to workers at the factory in China, the dust had been thick in the air, caking the workers' skin and clothes.

The disaster in China resembles, on a larger scale, accidents that have occurred all too frequently in the United States. Since 2003, the United States Chemical Safety Board, the independent federal agency of which I am the chairman, has been investigating these accidents. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that accidents with high numbers of fatalities aren't possible here, too.

Take the Hoeganaes metal powder plant in Gallatin, Tennessee, where three serious combustible metal dust accidents occurred in 2011 alone, killing five workers. Our investigators concluded that given the amount of accumulated dust, it was fortunate that a secondary dust explosion had not ignited and cascaded through the whole facility, which employed almost 200 workers.

Other industries facing this type of danger include those that process food, wood, rubber, plastics and pharmaceuticals, all of which are combustible in the form of tiny particles and dust. One evening in February 2008, a series of sugar dust explosions swept through the Imperial Sugar refinery in Georgia, killing 14 workers, burning dozens of others and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property losses.

From 2008 to 2012, our board documented, 50 combustible dust accidents that led to 29 fatalities and 161 injuries.

Dust explosions are readily preventable with engineering controls, ventilation, training and other measures. The voluntary, industry-supported national fire codes have urged these measures for decades, and they now must be codified and enforced through federal regulations.

In 1987, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the United States Department of Labor, promulgated a set of regulations for combustible dust for the grain industry. This resulted in a significant drop in grain dust explosions and an increase in lives saved, at an acceptable financial cost.

Following a study that our board conducted in 2006, we recommended that OSHA establish a comprehensive combustible dust regulatory standard for all industries. The following year, it developed an enhanced enforcement programme, but the critical component - a national standard with clear requirements - has yet to be created.

Despite the fact that a dust standard was one of the Obama administration's earliest regulatory initiatives, there has been little progress because of a daunting rule-making process. Since 1980, a series of laws, executive orders and judicial barriers have virtually paralysed the government's ability to issue new safety standards. According to a nonpartisan congressional study, the process can take nearly 20 years from start to finish. Given those conditions, is it any wonder that a recent RAND Corporation report found that American workers are three times more likely than their British counterparts to die on the job?

I believe that OSHA's leadership wants to move forward with a combustible dust standard just as much as we do. But as its director, David Michaels, recently told NBC News, "We have a standards process that is broken."

Inaction could cost lives. I will never forget hearing from Chris Sherburne, whose husband, Wiley, had worked as an electrician at the Hoeganaes facility. She told of his fears as he walked through the plant on quieter nights, hearing the echo from sparking electricity as iron dust seeped into electrical boxes and ignited.

Sherburne will never see her husband again. On January 31, 2011, as he tried to restart a jammed powder conveyor, he was enveloped in a fiery metal dust cloud that burned more than 95 percent of his body. He died a few days later. His ordeal is one of countless reasons our board voted last year to call a combustible dust standard our "most wanted safety improvement."

Industry and government in this country need to work together to control this danger. The deaths of workers as a result of known and preventable hazards are unacceptable.

(Rafael Moure-Eraso is the chairman of the United States Chemical Safety Board)

©2014 The New York Times News Service