Canadian Biomass • Spring 2025 • Final Thoughts

You’ve taken the last article’s advice and you and your team have completed a dust hazard assessment (DHA). Your consultant has done their thing and now you’ve been given a report full of pictures, tables, graphs, and likely, a lengthy list of deficiencies. The deficiency list likely ranges from cleaning/housekeeping and electrical area classification to procedures and installation of new safety equipment or replacement of existing equipment.

Now it’s up to you and your team to figure out what to do with it. There’s plenty of discussion about how to do a DHA, but you don’t always get a clear picture of what to do you with it. How do you take the deficiency list and turn it into actionable items? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone, this is a question a lot of facilities ask. Where do you start? Start by making a plan.

From the DHA deficiency list, you first need to determine what items are requirements and what are recommendations. First, let’s talk about requirements. Requirements are those items that are mandated by NFPA codes/standards, provincial or federal building/fire codes, and/or local requirements. These are items that must be implemented. These are such things a explosion protection and safe blast zones.

The other items that do not fit into this category are recommendations. These are items that are considered good industry practices and/or improve the efficiency/ life cycle of the equipment. This might be something like the installation of additional dust collection hoods, instead of increasing housekeeping in a given area or installing additional sensors for an extra layer of safety.

Once you’ve nailed down your required list, start splitting this up into two main categories: items that can be done fast, easily or cheaply and those that will take more time and capital to implement.

The fast list is something that you just churn out. Start assigning tasks to people and knock those items out. This will also give you momentum with the longer lead items.

Determining where to start with the longer lead items can get tricky. In an ideal world there is an endless supply of capital and unlimited downtime to implement things. But we all know this isn’t reality, or even close. Not all the recommendations listed will be able to be implemented right away due to equipment lead times, production requirements, accessibility to capital, the quantity of upgrades required or other reasons.

If you lucked out, your DHA author ranked your issues, or at the very least gave it a “badness” number. If that’s the case, you can simply start with the worst ranked and work your way up the list. If you didn’t get any sort of ranking, or if everything is equally ranked in your DHA, then you need to start by picking the worst, bad ones. Items that carry the most risk should be address first. If you’re only able to complete one of ten high risk items this year, start with the items that will have the greatest impact. Those are things like having explosion vents that discharge inside, active ignition sources (sparks going into dust collector, hot surfaces covered in dust) or unsafe blast zone.

If there are a bunch of those then look at how often a piece of equipment is used. The more frequent it’s use, the higher the likelihood of an incident. How often people are around these pieces of equipment? If people are around them all the time, then again there is a higher chance of incident.

Only after items that have potential harm to human life are dealt with then should items dealing with process loss be considered.

There are a million ways to shake the list out and approach where to start. If you don’t feel like you (or your team) have the expertise to make the decisions on where to start, then ask for help. Go back to the DHA author or another knowledgeable trusted professional. The hardest thing is starting but this project must be eaten like an elephant. One bite at a time.

Diane has spent the past 20-plus years working with the design, installation and retrofitting of dust collection systems in industries ranging from sawmills and grain installations to food and beverage and specialty chemicals. Diane’s expertise covers all aspects of dust collection systems from troubleshooting system issues, upgrading systems to meet current codes and standards. Diane has also assessed hundreds of dust collection systems for combustible dust hazards using the latest NFPA codes and standards and completed numerous dust hazard assessments. She can also provide advice and design experience for explosion protection systems, vessel retrofits, Pred verification, and static bonding and grounding. Diane has conducted numerous webinars and training session for clients and industrial publications. She has multiple articles published in various industry magazines.