Episode 187: Hazards and Risk

In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French explores the tragic consequences of neglecting workplace safety through the lens of a devastating explosion at a biofuels plant in Nebraska. The explosion killed a 32-year-old employee and his two young daughters, who were waiting at the site to go to a doctor’s appointment. The incident highlights the very real and human cost of safety failures—not just for workers, but for entire communities.

Mark reflects on how preventable the event was, citing past OSHA violations and air quality complaints indicating excessive wood dust escaping the facility. These were clear warnings that went unaddressed. He emphasizes that safety isn't just about compliance—it's about culture. While the company likely didn’t intend harm, its failure to act on known hazards allowed a manageable issue to become a deadly risk.

The podcast digs into the fundamental safety principles of identifying hazards, assessing risk, and cultivating a proactive culture. Hazards are inevitable, but uncontrolled risk is not. Mark challenges listeners to ensure that their workplace culture aligns with values that prioritize human life and community wellbeing.

He closes with a powerful reminder: safety professionals must stay vigilant, not just for compliance, but to protect people, families, and the broader community from tragedies that should never happen.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, we're talking about an explosion in Nebraska in the real cost of safety, a tragic accident. What can be done, and why does it matter? This week on the podcast, you

Announcer: 0:33

Mark, welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety, nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French, Mark,

Mark French: 1:31

welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am your host, Mark, and I am so glad you've joined me. Glad to be part of your podcast rotation. Thank you for allowing me this opportunity this week. A lot caught my eye, but one in particular really did. I've been doing a lot of research and talking recently, and I just finished up talking and creating some presentations on culture and creating a safety culture. And this is where it really matters. When we talk about, why does safety matter? It seems obvious to a lot of us that it's about life, it's about preventing harm, it's about doing the right thing. And yet, there are times where things don't go the way they should, and it becomes disappointing when you see the chain of events that led to it. And there was this one had a lot of a lot of tragedy, and let me just go into it. So this was in Nebraska, and this was a biofuels plant that basically chopped up wood into pellets. So it made wood pellets, and it had an explosion, and the explosion cost the life of a 32 year old father. But on top of that, he had his two children, an eight year old and a 12 year old, with him there waiting for them him to get off work so Allegedly, he could take them to a doctor's appointment. Some of this hasn't been exactly confirmed. There's a lot of filling in the lines, but ultimately, we know they were there with their dad or waiting on their dad to go to a doctor's appointment, and they recovered the two girls bodies 24 hours after the accidental I like the way that the news media put that in accidental dust, fire that exploded. And when you when I look at the pictures of this, I mean, this wasn't this was huge. This was a massive wood fire explosion. So there was a lot of wood dust for this to ignite explosively the way that it did. This cost the life of a father who was the worker and his two children. This is the real cost of safety. We as safety people, and this is something I try to reiterate. And I'm not perfect. I'm never gonna say I'm perfect. But the reason we do what we do, the reason that we work safe, the reason that we create safety it's for our people, and it's for the communities we live in. What an incident like this affects a community, even if it was just one person, and this week, when I'm looking at the news and I'm looking at a lot of the items that happened in the past week, it was it was trench collapse after trench collapse after trench collapse, just over and over. And then there was a grain elevator entrapment, lots of unfortunate people killed in crashes and hit on the side of the road, extreme heat issues for someone working on a roof. And then there were explosions. And this was the one explosion that really i. Beyond any other explosion, brought me into it when you read that the headline reads, Nebraska plant explosion kills two girls and an employee. And my first thought was, Wow, this must have been a huge explosion, and maybe there were houses nearby. It never hit me that sometimes our families visit us. They come up to work, they drop off, maybe a lunch, maybe they are there. But the safety we create every day, and it not only affects the people in the process and the plant in their immediate area, but it affects this is a direct example of how the community gets affected through something that was preventable. This wasn't an accident. This is preventable because here, let's look at, I will say, the local, some local news media, did some pretty good investigation here and will, I want to point out a few things that that they've found here, that the Nebraska Department of Energy and Environment had already investigated air quality complaints that year, and at that Time, they found wood dust beyond the property line. Okay, so when we talk about, like, those who have gone to, like, smoke school or look up and you look at to make sure it's like the air vapor, water vapor from your scrubbers are working, and it's not actually material coming out. I mean, there's training for that, for air quality. The fact that wood dust was being blown over the property line suggests that the scrubber just wasn't there's, there's a high likelihood here that the scrubber was, if there even was one, they were just blowing wood out the top, wood dust. Now getting an ignition point for wood dust is one thing getting a full blown explosion that took the top. This would look kind of multi story building. It completely blew the top off of it in the bottom around it looks like complete wreckage. Now you can search this. It's if you just search Nebraska biofuel explosion, you'll see the pictures the Associated Press posted them. And as I look at them, I can't describe I mean, it truly is a PSM style explosion. And we've known that consumer goods can do this for a really long time. This is we have known about the threat of combustible dust hazards for a long time. Sugar Factory, flower factory, these happen, and we have seen the devastation we're and then we act like we're surprised not say we. This is the royal we of looking at the world of outside, of safety. We know as safety people, this happens. But then the outside world was, Oh, my goodness, we didn't. How should they have known that wood would explode and combust, but for this level of destruction, this was significant. This was not a mild event. This was not a low level issue. And of course, OSHA is investigating. Other people are investigating, but they also had some fines in 2012 for serious violation, for basically, machine maintenance. The company also failed to make sure wood dust didn't pile up around milling machine, according to ocean This is years ago, including lack of training and communication on workplace hazard. So it seemed like a very basic fine here from 2012 OSHA. And of course, we know OSHA doesn't have the funding to keep keep up with what all they have to keep up with. And yet, the lesson wasn't learned. And yet now here we see that this is what happens. The company has 10 employees, according to the Partnership website. So there was 10 employees. It's barely big enough for OSHA. They're chipping up wood. They're doing what they need to do. They're probably running under the radar. It can happen to any business of any size. It's about risk. It's about hazard. It's about culture. Let's talk about that. I wanted to go deeper with risk hazard culture, because this is what screams at me at this point. Risk hazard culture, protecting our people, protecting their families, protecting our communities. Yeah, so important, and this is just a stark, stark reminder of that. Let's talk more about that on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast

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Mark French: 10:53

and welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. This week, we're talking about an explosion in Nebraska wood explosion. It killed a father and two daughters that were with him at work. Being a 10 person site, it's understandable that he would bring his kids up to the workplace. Hey, just wait for dad to get done. I got to finish up. Then we'll go to the doctor, do your whatever we need to do there. And then the explosion happens. So what I wanted to focus on is that OSHA generally has been, well, we don't want to burden small businesses by unless there are over so many people, so we don't get involved. We don't have issues. Yet, there were some real leading indicators that someone needed to take seriously, someone who owned the company, someone who managed the company, needed to take it seriously. Would dust over the property, property line when there's an air complaint, there's significant issues, and to ignore the risks, the hazards, and then to look at the culture I am sure. Now, here's something I am I am sure of, or so pretty sure that I would, I would lay down firm my word on this one, I feel very good. But this company never wanted to see anyone get hurt. They did not want to see an employee get hurt. They did not want to see employee get killed. They definitely did not want an employee and their children to be killed at a workplace explosion. This is not the way they wanted to be known. They wanted to probably be known as a company that that helped 10 people have a decent job in this town doing some work. That's probably what they wanted to be known as, is someone who provided some jobs for good families of this community. Then this happens. There was things that were ignored. Their culture. Probably wanted to talk about how important things are but their actions said something different. They had the OSHA fine, they had the air complaint, and we don't see anything changing because of that. We don't see the indicators making a difference to the culture and to the direction of the company, knowing that the risk is real, knowing that this can happen, but in the world of safety, we know it's easy to say, well, we've done it this way for so long. We've never had an issue. What's going to do it today? Well, today was the spark. Today was the explosion. Today was the consequence of all those actions. And so we look at risk and hazard. So let's start with hazards. Every workplace has hazards, and we have to know what those hazards are. This one was obvious. You were told by OSHA. You were told by the Air Quality Department, you have a hazard with dust. It can lead to things, it can do things. It can burn, it can maybe explode. It can explode. The hazard exists. Next, we have to categorize the risk. How big of a risk is it? So let's say it's a little bit of dust, but it's not huge. Okay, we have a hazard. We're controlling it so that the risk doesn't get huge. In this case, the hazard became a significant risk because it was uncontrolled at all. The culture allowed the hazard to become a big risk because hazards are going to exist. The Hazards are always there. It's the quantification of risk. How much risk is it? I leave something in the floor that I can trip on hazard. It's also around something very dangerous that I could trip and really hurt myself. The hazard increases because of that. So in this case, in. In these cases, we hope that an organization that has a culture that cares, and that's what's really speaking to me here recently, is no one wanders into work and says, Oh, I'm something. I want to get hurt. No organization operates saying, well, we want to hurt people now there. There are definitely some organizations that turn a blind eye. There are organizations that lead from spreadsheets, that lead from whatever, and they see the cost of hurting people as just part of doing business. And we've seen that in the past through different lawsuits and different organizations, even in in general liability law, where some organizations and companies felt that the the dangerous product they put on the market, it was cheaper to pay the claims and it was to recall the product. We've seen that we know it happens in the capitalist world. There are some organizations that shoes that bet that direction, that's disappointing. There's no social contract there. There's no it's just disappointing. I can go on and on about that. It's just disappointing, period. And so we look here and I don't get the feeling with a 10 person factory that in this area is, is, is that level of negligence? Don't know that maybe, maybe some different where they, they cut some capital, or they, somebody made a huge profit that year and banked all the money and didn't do any of the fixes, or just vacuuming up and sweeping up and getting rid of all the dust and debris that's around. Maybe, so maybe, maybe that was their decision to pay the fines rather than fix it. I hope not. But in this case, again, what the culture created itself and propagated itself to where the hazard became an unmitigated big risk. So as people and leaders, we have to look at what are the hazards that our people encounter. And again, this is, this is hard, hard proof of where the facility, safety, the facility, people, empathy, culture directly impacted not just the workers anymore. It impacted so much more, huge ripples through the community huge ripples to me, from sitting here in Kentucky and reading about it and looking at it and thinking about this, it sends waves of emotion through to Think about something like this. And so that's where we have to think about, what hazards do we encounter, what hazards are our people encountering, and how much risk are we bringing to our people and to our community. Thanks for joining me this week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, tough, tough week this week, reading through the news and seeing this. This one hits hard I do send out so many just thoughts prayers for what is going on here. And until next time we chat, stay safe. You

Announcer: 19:03

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