Text For Citation: 01 Item/Group: 002 Hazard:

29 CFR 1910.119(e)(3)(vii): The employer did not ensure that the process hazard analysis (PHA) had a complete qualitative evaluation of a range of the possible safety and health effects of failures of controls: The employer was failing to protect employees from explosion hazards. This was most recently documented at a worksite, at or near, 3305 West Old Potash Highway, Alda, Nebraska on October 13, 2023. The process hazard analysis (PHA) did not fully address qualitative evaluation of a range of the possible safety and health effects of failures of controls including, but not limited to; having an incomplete evaluation on the PHA - Primer Compounding. There was an evaluation of the mitigation of an explosion; however, there was no evaluation of the consequences of the blast door being open while an operator is in the process of manually scaping a batch. On October 13, 2023, an employee was killed when an explosion occurred while the employee was scraping a primer compound batch between mix cycles. Another employee in an adjacent room was performing other tasks at time of the incident. When the explosion took place, the blast door was open and as a result the employee in the adjacent room suffered concussive force injures.