Inherently safer design is part of PSM and can be used to eliminate the hazards, so you are starting with a safer facility but you can still incorporate ISD in an existing facility by making changes. Another important component of PSM is CCM, which helps us identify and manage our critical controls. With the CCM in place we can assign accountabilities and a monitoring system to ensure those critical controls are managed. What is PSM, and why is it important? of how ISD can be applied in operating facilities, which has led to impressive safety improvements in the county. Since 1998, there has been a downward trend in their loss producing incidents over the past 20 years. Can you tell me about your current work with the pellet industry? What’s next for the CCM Initiative? It is an organization’s all-encompassing program to ensure that people, property, the environment, and business operations are protected from loss-producing incidents. It includes a broad range of elements, from hazard analysis to safety culture to key performance indicators, which all work together to achieve safer operations, and includes all levels of a plant from leadership to the frontline workers. How does PSM differ from traditional approaches? The project I’m working on, along with Eric Brideau and Dr. Paul Amyotte, is “Inherently Safer Bow Ties for Dust Hazard Analysis,” under an Innovation at Work (IAW) grant funded by WorkSafeBC. As part of WPAC’s and BCFSC’s Critical Control Management initiative, I am leading bow tie workshops for wood pellet facilities to develop bow ties for the hammer mill, pelletizer, baghouse and silo storage. Now, Eric and I are examining these bow ties and identifying ways to incorporate ISD. What is a bow tie, and how does it aid our understanding of safety? So far, we’ve completed workshops at two facilities. Each workshop is five hours a day for a week. Because of the pandemic, I’ve had to lead them virtually, but the uptake has been great. The workshop teams include people with diverse knowledge bases and across all levels of leadership. BCFSC safety advisors Bill Laturnus and Tyler Bartels provide on-site and online support. How will you know if CCM has been successful? I think when organizations are approaching safety with an inherent safety mindset, including when people are building facilities, or looking at management change or doing incident investigations or other opportunities they have to explicitly and routinely incorporate inherent safety design. And, of course, working with the other elements of process safety management, towards the ultimate goal of reducing the frequency of severe incidents. • Gordon Murray is the executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada. For decades, we relied on the traditional approach to occupational health and safety where it looks at the responsibilities of workers and having a safety program in place. Process safety goes beyond that and tries to anticipate how all the processes interconnect and what could go wrong. The fact is, you can be as personally safe as you want and wear all your PPE (personal protective equipment), but if the underlying process is not safe, you can still have a disaster like Deepwater Horizon. Are there opportunities for ISD for the wood pellet industry? It’s basically a visual tool that shows how a hazard could lead to a dangerous event like an explosion or fire. The Major Unwanted Event is the knot in the middle. The rest of the elements of the bow tie aid our understanding of safety because it allows us to assess how dangerous situations may arise and determine what controls we need to have in place in order to manage this risk. What main areas of the plant are you looking at? Absolutely! For example, moving dust collectors from inside a building or envelope to the outside. Another good example is, instead of minimizing hot work, what if we avoided it altogether and removed the ignition sources? Are these types of actions being tracked and reported? Are there any leaders in ISD that stand out for you? Yes, Contra Costa County in California. First, the Industrial Safety Ordinance (ISO) regulated facilities in the county in 1998. Facilities must communicate how they are incorporating ISD. This reporting is helping to expand our understanding of how ISD is being implemented and gives examples In an example of combustible dust in a hammer mill, which could lead to a dust explosion, we first need to understand how this could happen and how it could be prevented. We consider ignition sources, including prevention barriers such as rock traps and hot work programs. Next, we think about what the consequences of a dust explosion would be and how they might be mitigated. We consider negative consequences, like harm to people and equipment, and examine mitigation barriers like emergency response plans and water deluge systems. It’s really important to look at how prevention and mitigation barriers degrade and fail and how we can improve those efforts by practicing emergency drills and scheduling preventative maintenance for safety equipment. | FROM DESIGN TO CONSTRUCTION, LET FWS BRING YOUR PROJECT TO LIFE! 1 800 553 0007 FWS group.com DESIGN-BUILD approach integrated Canadian BIOMASS 21
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