What if Deadly Dust Explosions Were Airplane Crashes?

by Mike Hall, Feb 25, 2008

If a certain kind of plane kept falling out of the sky, killing and maiming hundreds of passengers, the public would be outraged if the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ignored the advice of aviation experts calling for new safety standards.

Surely the outrage would boil over if the FAA instead told industry: “Hey are some voluntary safety guidelines. See what you can do, OK?”

That’s a ludicrous scenario the federal government and the aviation industry would never allow to happen in real life, writes longtime workplace safety advocate Les Leopold. However, substitute dust explosions for crashing airplanes and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for the FAA—and that is the reality in our nation today, he says.

In a recent column on AlterNet, Leopold (who also authored the biography of legendary workplace safety activist Tony Mazzocchi) writes that in the past 12 years, there have been 281 dust explosions. The blasts were ignited by a variety of dusts, from grain to cotton to sugar. The most recent occurred Feb. 7 at the Imperial Sugar plant in Port Wentworth, Ga., killing nine workers and leaving 15 others still hospitalized in critical condition.

Such explosions have killed 119 workers and seriously injured another 781. But OSHA has ignored calls for a mandatory dust standard. A year ago, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) issued a report calling for mandatory regulations to prevent such explosions, Leopold writes, adding:

But as of the Port Wentworth catastrophe, the board had not received a written response from the Bush administration’s [OSHA] about what actions would be taken. The result of this laissez-affaire approach to regulation enabled the industry to police itself and we now see the fatal results.

He asks why is there such a “double standard,” one for aviation safety and one for workplace safety, and finds the answer in Mazzocchi’s work.

Tony Mazzocchi (1926–2002), the labor leader most responsible for the passage of OSHA and who first called for the creation of the [CSB], followed the money. In the airline industry, he argued, profits depend on safety. In industrial facilities, the drive for profits undermines safety.

On top of the corporate world’s safety-costs-profits motive, add a Bush administration that has cut workplace safety funds and programs, preached “deregulation” and turned to “voluntary guidelines” instead of strong safety standards, and that’s a script for disaster. Writes Leopold:

Even more egregious is that OSHA knew about the dangers of dust explosions, as it headlined a bulletin issued on July 31, 2005, “Combustible Dust in Industry: Preventing and Mitigating the Effects of Fire and Explosions.” The bulletin is filled with graphic descriptions of prior deadly explosions in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Indiana, and what is needed to prevent future incidents.

The Bush administration took care to make sure that despite the findings and the suggestions for improvements, that the bulletin was “not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations. The bulletin is advisory in nature, informational in content, and is intended to assist employers in providing a safe and healthful workplace.”

Click here to read Leopold’s entire column and here to read more about Mazzocchi.

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