Seaforth barn explosion could hold safety lessons for the pork industry

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

When methane exploded in a Huron County pig barn in 2012, it seriously injured the owner and his co-worker. The resulting court case and subsequent counter-charges could have industry-wide implications

by MARY BAXTER

There was little in how the Sunday, Sept. 30 2012, work day began at the medium-sized pig farm near Seaforth, Huron County to suggest how it would end – in an explosion that would gravely injure the owner, Dann Eedy, and his employee, Joshua Purdy, and, three years later, be the subject of a potentially industry-defining court case in Goderich.

Morning chores progressed routinely on the 100-acre property that Eedy had bought from Anthony and Karen Van Bakel in 2008. Eedy was working in the main barn, where he was finishing about 1,200 animals for another local farmer. In the 1,500-head nursery and the old bank barn where more animals were finished, worked Eedy's new part-time hand, feeding and cleaning. Fifteen-year-old Joshua Purdy attended Central Huron Secondary School in Clinton and had started working for Eedy in August, helping out before and after school and on weekends.

The barn where Eedy worked contained eight pig rooms. A four-foot-wide hallway roughly 170 feet long divided the building into two sections with four pens on each side. In the hallway were electrical boxes for the automated feeding system as well as controls to manage heating and cooling in the rooms, including a three-stage power ventilation system, room light switches and, at the south end, a hall light switch.

Plates for some of the pig room light switches were missing. So were some switches. Deterioration of the switches had been a problem ever since Eedy acquired the operation, with moisture the suspected cause. The electrician who was working on the new barn Eedy was building was expected to repair the switches that coming week.

On Sunday so close to noon, though, Eedy didn't need lights in the pens. The rooms' windows provided enough illumination for his activity.

Eedy, then 25 and of medium height with the broad shoulders of a football player, had studied at University of Guelph Ridgetown College campus. One former local municipal councillor has described him as a "go-getter." Roughly seven months before that Sunday, he and his wife, Stephanie, had welcomed the birth of their first child, son Owen.

Earlier in the week, Eedy and his father, Robert, had finished soybean harvest. Robert had wanted to plant winter wheat and add manure from the pig barn, but Friday's rain kept them from the fields.  

Monday's forecast looked promising, and the younger Eedy was using the weekend to prepare for the return to the fields. On Saturday, he had pumped 5,000 U.S. gallons of manure into a tanker, using a port by the barn connected to an exterior basin that was fed manure from the interior sloping trough located beneath the barn's hallway. Sunday's task was to transfer the manure collected in the chambers beneath the slatted pens to the central trough for pump out.

Eedy was comfortable handling liquid manure: before he'd acquired the pig farm, he had worked at a liquid manure hauler and applicator company. To shift the manure from pit to pit, he raised the stainless steel baffle gates by hand.

By noon, he was nearly finished when Purdy found him in the room in the northeast corner of the barn. Purdy announced he was finished with chores. During the 2015 trial in an Ontario Court of Justice in Goderich where Eedy successfully fought two charges under the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Huron County farmer recalled adjusting ventilation controls in the pig chamber as he was leaving the room. The door was still open and he heard the fan change speed. It was 12:05 p.m.

"I heard a 'woof or a whoosh,'" Eedy said. He put his right arm over his eyes and bent over and felt along the cement wall with his left hand to get a bearing. "It was extremely hot." He began to run towards the end of the barn where the feed room was, running through most of the fire with his eyes shut.

Purdy ran towards the barn's loading chute exit and jumped into a puddle on the farm's driveway. "I stood up and realized my right shoulder was on fire," the teen recalled on the witness stand in Goderich. He ripped off all of his clothes except his underwear and socks and paced to maintain consciousness.

Methane the culprit
Both Eedy and Purdy were rushed to London for emergency treatment. Eedy was hospitalized for three months for burns to his arm, hands, torso, shoulders and head; he lost the digit of one thumb when gangrene set in during a medically-induced coma and continues to deal with pain not only from scarring from the burns but also to one knee because of an infection contracted while in hospital. Purdy suffered first, second and third-degree burns from the waist up; seven surgeries later he continues to experience muscle and joint pain from scarring.

Back at the farm, the Ontario Ministry of Labour, with the assistance of the Office of the Ontario Fire Marshall, the Electrical Safety Authority, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and the OPP, began an investigation.

The next several days of inspection and tests would lead to the conclusion that methane, released during the transfer of the manure, had escaped from holes in the clean-out plate covers that protected narrow slats in the hall used to flush wastewater from cleaning into the pit. The gas then collected in the hallway, trapped because of inadequate ventilation. (Doors and two air inlets with self-adjusting openings were the hallway's main sources of ventilation and there was no fan in the centre pit.)

The ministry charged 2182409 Ontario Limited, of which Eedy is the sole principal, with failing to ensure that the equipment, materials and protective devices provided in the workplace were maintained in good condition and failing to take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances for protecting an employee.  

In June, Justice of the Peace Helen Gale dismissed the charges. She noted that both Purdy and Eedy had suffered terribly and commended "their brave testimony as they both recalled the events of that day, the long hospitalization, surgeries, injury and scars, both mental and physical." She cited testimony from a technical advisor with the Electrical Safety Authority, who had noted the installation was code-compliant with the exception of some switches that appeared to be removed.

"This did not appear to be a factor," Gale quoted from the advisor's report about the removed switches. She also referred to a report and testimony by Paul Gubbels, a Kitchener engineer, as well as other testimony from electrical experts that noted there were at least 70 potential ignition sources located in the hallway where the fire took place.

William Lin, a Labour Ministry spokesman, says there are no plans to appeal the decision.

The five-day hearing exonerated Eedy, but the case itself may hold implications for the agricultural community about dealing with the safety risks of manure gases in barns.

For example, one of the questions arising from the expert testimony is whether regular light switches, which generate a small spark when turned on and off, as do other electrical equipment, present an ignition risk in livestock barns.  

Brian Bromley, senior inspector of the Stratford District of the Ontario Electrical Safety Authority, who testified for the Crown, noted that even if all of the switches in Eedy's barn had been in good condition, they still would have posed an ignition risk in the presence of methane within a flammable range.

Bromley explained that in areas of flame or explosion risk, designated as Class 1 under the Ontario Electrical Safety Code, only special light switches that can contain a spark or small explosion of gas could be installed. The code, however, does not require these switches to be used in barns.

Nor should it, says Dean Anderson, Workplace Safety and Prevention Services strategic advisor for agriculture, in a recent interview. "In my mind, there's only so far you can go," he says. "If you're going to start doing that, then you need to make sure all the motors on the fans – everything – is to that standard." The risk of a methane flash fire is too small to warrant such sweeping measures, Anderson argues.

Methane risk low
From 1990 to 2008, according to a Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting analysis, only five of 512 deaths were attributed to manure pit gases and all of those incidents were attributed to hydrogen sulphide poisoning. Hydrogen sulphide is not flammable.   

Randy Drysdale, Farm Mutual Reinsurance Plan assistant vice-president of loss control, notes that, in a typical barn, methane normally wouldn't build up to the point where a spark as small as one in a light switch would start a fire.

"A barn typically isn't designed to have a tightly closed atmosphere," he says. Yes, there have been explosions where methane was suspected. If everything in a barn is "shut up tight" and then manure is agitated, there is potential for methane to be in the air. "The hard thing is, to have that much methane in the atmosphere to cause an explosion, it has to be at the upper explosive limit, and I believe that's around 14 per cent. Normally, it never gets that high because they (the barns) are vented."

The importance of ensuring adequate ventilation in all areas above manure pits – not just those located beneath the pigs – was another key issue raised during the trial.

Ron MacDonald, an agricultural engineer and expert in agricultural ventilation systems who testified for the defence, noted the barn's unusual manure pit design that included a large pump-out manure pit beneath a hallway with only passive ventilation. This contributed to the risk when the manure was being transferred because the gas had nowhere to go but up the clean-out plate cover holes into the hallway. "Basically I would consider it a ticking time bomb," MacDonald said.

The importance of ventilation has been frequently addressed in recent years, both in publications and extension activities, and the need to ensure that ventilation is working properly in pig rooms is well understood. But what Eedy's defence successfully argued was there has been little literature or discussion about the hazards manure gas might present in areas of the barn accessed only by workers.

"We don't tend, historically, to have evaluated the quality of the air in those spots," Anderson concurs. "So it would be a research gap. Same thing with dust and dander and those kinds of things in a pig barn."

There has been some effort to address the topic since the accident, most notably an Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs fact sheet published in 2013 that discussed the potential for methane to accumulate in other parts of the barn. As well, the ministry is exploring partnering with the North Huron fire department to install sensors in a barn in order to determine what activities or conditions can lead to a rise of methane levels.

South of the border, Pennsylvania State University has been addressing the issue in a seven-year project intended to raise awareness about the hazards of working with manure in barns. The project has resulted in the 2014 American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers publication of a standard called Ventilating Manure Storages to Reduce Entry Risks. Davis Hill, program director of Penn State's managing agricultural emergencies department, says the standard is North American wide and also recognized "across the ocean."  

Hill displayed another component of the university's campaign at Canada's Outdoor Farm Show in Woodstock in September – a demonstration trailer that outlines the risks of hazardous manure gases. Hill has also taken the trailer to Georgia, Iowa and Ohio. "We're trying to promote the fact that farmers should really take a proactive approach at identifying hazards on the farm, those things that can cause problems, and fix them," he says.

Claims and counter-claims
Though the provincial charges against Eedy have been dropped, the family's time in Ontario courts is not done. Last year, Eedy and his family filed a civil suit against the barn's builder, Sebringville-based FGC Limited, the Van Bakels, the township of Huron East, Ag-Co Products Limited and NA Engineering Associates Inc. The family is claiming nearly $7.85 million in damages and asserts that negligence and faulty design, construction and inspection of the barn created greater-than-normal risky conditions that led to the explosion. All claims have yet to be tested in court.

The civil suit is in early stages. The defendants have filed statements denying the family's claims, and some, such as the Van Bakels, have also filed notices of counter- and cross-claims. As of late September, FGC Limited had only filed a notice of intent to defend and Huron East had requested a trial by judge, but no court date had been set.

The case has the potential to define, in civil law at least, who bears the responsibility for ensuring a ventilation system adequately serves all parts of the barn. Once again, the outcome could have industry-wide implications and undoubtedly the Ontario hog sector will monitor the case with interest as it continues to unfold. BP

How to stay safe when working with manure
Sam Bradshaw, Ontario Pork's environmental specialist, and Dean Anderson, Workplace Safety and Prevention Services strategic advisor agriculture, stress the importance of taking precautions when managing manure.

Instances involving poisonous manure gases like hydrogen sulphide might be rare but when they do happen, they're often lethal, says Anderson. The gas, which is heavier than air, can be tricky to detect. "I've heard of guys in municipal manure tanks (for maintenance) – human waste – getting halfway across the tank and their sensors start to go off," Anderson says. "Of course, you can't get out. You're in the middle of the tank when this happens."

Recent years have also seen the arrival of foaming manure, which produces bubbles that Bradshaw describes as "really thick, like ice cream," that can push out of manure pits. No one knows what causes the phenomenon. The foam's bubbles trap and concentrate methane. When they break, the gas escapes rapidly and can collect in areas above the manure pit. If it reaches concentrations in the air of five to 15 per cent, it can become explosive. (Foaming manure was not a factor in the Eedy barn explosion in 2012).

So, to keep you safe while working with manure, here are some recommendations from Anderson and Bradshaw:

• Check your ventilation system to ensure it's working before you begin. Run the fans for at least an hour before moving manure.
• Make sure everyone is aware of what you're doing and remove anyone who is not needed for the task. Consider adding a sign to the door to caution people to stay out while the manure is being moved.
• Shut down anything that can start automatically.
• Wear a gas monitor while moving or agitating manure located beneath slatted floors. Monitors can last up to a year and must be calibrated regularly.
• Don't agitate or pump manure if the weather conditions aren't right, such as on a day with little wind or a temperature inversion.
• Monitor the ventilation system regularly to ensure that it's working properly.
• Regularly monitor your barn's electrical receptacles and arrange either an annual inspection by an electrician or an inspection by your insurance company with a thermal sensing camera.
• Inform your employees of the risks and how they are managed in your barn.

If you encounter foaming manure, remove everyone from the building. Wear a gas detector and ensure the fans are running. "We can knock this stuff down with high pressure washers, but it's not a complete fix. It'll come back," says Bradshaw. BP