Podcast: The state of industrial safety – How does your plant stack up?

Dave Blanchard is editor in chief of EHS Today. During his tenure at Endeavor Business Media, Dave has led the editorial management of many of the company’s best-known brands. Additionally, he serves as senior content director of the annual Safety Leadership Conference. Traci Purdum is editor in chief of Chemical Processing. Traci is an award-winning business journalist with extensive experience covering manufacturing and management issues. Dave and Traci recently spoke with IndustryWeek editor in chief Robert Schoenberger about how worker safety is impacting the manufacturing industry.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

IW: Traci, we have some questions for you about the chemical industry specifically, but just in that sense of where companies are putting their priorities these days. Do you feel or have you heard from people in the chemical world about employees feeling unheard or feeling that their companies are being a little performative when they talk about safety being their lead priority?

TP: I think the chemical industry is a little bit different in terms of there's just a lot more hazards when you walk into a chemical facility. So it has to be top of mind. And for the most part, it comes from management down. So they do walk the walk, but obviously there's hazardous, you know, catastrophes that happen all the time. Obviously, we're not learning from those lessons from past incidents, so it's an ongoing battle to make sure that safety is top of mind to help the bottom line. And I think that people realize being safe and offering a safe workplace for their employees will benefit all around. But getting the message across, sometimes it's difficult, you know.

Operator training sometimes just falls back on the job training, and you've got operators that are training their new workers, and they don't know how to teach. They know how to be safe on their own, but they don't know how to express that to somebody else. So things that are natural to them that they understand, like “Oh, don't do that, because this will happen,” they don't express that to some of the new folks coming in. And so that's where you have your hazards. You know, things that can happen.

So I think that it's just a whole realm of making sure, as Dave mentioned, the psychological safety, being able to say something if you see something and not feel like you're going to be, you know, your career is not going to be impacted by you saying something. You need to have that psychological safety. You need to be able to feel comfortable where you're at and understand things. So I think there's a whole bunch of things happening all at once and we need to make sure that the perfect storm doesn't happen.

IW: That’s great. But moving on to the chemical world specifically, there's been a lot of talk recently, even some discussion of regulations and new legislation around chemical safety concerning worker safety and chemical facilities, vinyl chloride specifically after that train derailment last year in East Palestine, Ohio, there was discussion of possibly tightening regulations on that. Can you give us an overview on what you're seeing?

TP: Well, obviously, the EPA has been very busy with regulations and their Toxic Substance Control Act. Many, many chemicals are on that list. And as you mentioned, vinyl chloride and chloroprene are also there, as is ethylene oxide, benzene, ethylene, dichloride. All of these, the EP is requiring fenceline monitoring. So, with chemical facilities, you have to worry about the inside and the outside. And that involves your communities as well. So, big things happening there. I think that they're just preparing for November's results, trying to push as much as they can through with these types of regulations. And so, with this fenceline monitoring, they really want to make sure that the community is safe as well and essentially monitoring a six-mile radius around facilities that are known to have hazardous emissions come out, so they want you to constantly monitor that.

Obviously, EPA and industry butt heads a lot. And you know, it's that checks and balances, which is very beneficial because you don't want the EPA overstepping, you don't want industry overstepping their bounds. So safety is the winner here when we have these types of things. But the conversation is happening. Some folks down in Louisiana, in the chemical corridor, sometimes called cancer alley, feel that they're being targeted unfairly. There's, you know, 200 plus facilities that are being mandated to get their fenceline monitoring up in the 90-day period and other companies with more hazardous chemicals coming out of there have a two-year window. So, there's this sense of it's not fair.

However, it can go to the ‘he said, she said,’ because there have been studies down in that chemical corridor where fenceline monitoring has happened and, you know, they have these remote vehicles that go out and can monitor the air quality, and the EPA bases the air quality on what has been delivered to them by industry. And then they find out on third-party testing that that's not always the case. So I think that there is some good work happening by the EPA to make sure that what is being said is true, And then industry, obviously, everything in the world is made of chemicals. So, there is a need for these types of chemicals. There has to be that balance. But at the bottom line of everything, it does have to be safety.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.