Ebook Grain Dust Explosion Prevention

The Government first gave consideration to the dangers from grain dust explosions and fires, as a result of a disastrous explosion in a feed grinding plant at Buffalo, New York, in 1913. As a result of this explosion, a series of investigations were conducted by the Bureau of Mines of the United States Department of the Interior, in cooperation with the milling and grain interests, with the view of determining the causes of such explosions and fires, and to devise methods for their prevention. Subsequently this project was turned over to the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture, and much valuable information brought together relative to explosions and fires in grain elevators, flour mills, threshing machines in the Pacific Northwest and in cotton gins of the South.

The importance of continuing and extending these investigations was fully realized at the beginning of the war, in order that the country's food supply might be fully protected against the hazards of dust explosions and fires. Accordingly the United States Department of Agriculture and the United States Food Administration inaugurated an extensive educational campaign, in the Fall of 1917, to provide the owners and operators of mills, elevators and threshing machines, with the information available, so that the losses resulting from dust explosions might be reduced to a minimum. The necessity for this undertaking was strongly emphasized by several disastrous dust explosions which occurred between March, 1916, and October, 1917, resulting in the destruction of four of the largest grain and cereal plants in the United States and Canada, together with the loss of twenty-four lives. The dust explosion, together with the fire which followed, in one of these plants (Brooklyn, New York), was of special significance at the time in that it resulted in the destruction of a quantity of grain equivalent to bread rations for an army of 200,000 men for an entire year, and at the same time most seriously crippled facilities badly needed for loading grain for overseas shipment.