CTA Report, Draft 1, ISP Review - US Chemical Safety and Hazard ...

CTA department supervisors were responsible for providing employees with information on the physical
and health hazards of specific chemicals in each work area. Interviews with supervisors and employees
revealed that crew safety meetings did not address the explosive hazards of phenolic resin. CTA did not
provide records to CSB documenting the content of supervisor-led training.
8.4 Facility Design and Construction
Lockwood Greene Engineers, Inc. designed and constructed the Corbin facility for CertainTeed in 1972.
FM Global (formerly Factory Mutual) was consulted by CertainTeed to review preliminary process
design drawings, which the company found to be acceptable.
CertainTeed intended to use plastic resins that were combustible dusts. During design and construction,
CertainTeed and Lockwood Greene could have used NFPA 654, Dust Explosion Prevention in the
Plastics Industry (1970), to minimize potential combustible dust hazards. Although this earlier version of
the standard was only applicable to the plastics industry, not to operations like CertainTeed’s, 22 it was
issued as a guide to eliminate or reduce dust explosion hazards (in this case, those that are inherent in the
manufacture, fabrication, molding, and handling of plastics). In 1976, NFPA expanded the scope of the
standard to include chemical, dye, and pharmaceutical dusts, but a new edition of the standard was not
issued until 1982. The organization revised the standard again in 1997 to include all industries where
manufacture, processing, blending, repackaging, and handling of combustible dusts presented a fire or
explosion hazard.
The 1970 version of NFPA 654 recommended separate, detached buildings for processing and handling
combustible dusts. For processes that could not be detached, NFPA 654 required segregation to minimize
22 CertainTeed did not consider itself a member of the plastics industry based upon its standard industrial
classification code.
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