Combustible Dust Risk Checklist

This checklist is an orientation tool, not a substitute for a Dust Hazard Analysis performed by a qualified person. It is meant to help a plant or safety manager decide whether the question deserves a closer, professional look — and in most dust-handling facilities, it does. Work through it honestly; a single yes in the first group is usually enough to warrant a formal DHA.

Does your process create, handle or accumulate a dust from any combustible material — wood, flour, sugar, grain, plastic, coal, most metals, pharmaceuticals or many chemicals? Can you find settled dust on beams, ledges, cable trays, motor housings or equipment tops? Is there anywhere a layer as thin as 1/32 inch — roughly the thickness of a paper-clip wire — covers a surface? Any yes here means combustible dust is plausibly present and the rest of the checklist matters.

How is that dust cleaned up today? Dry sweeping and compressed-air blowdown both resuspend fine particles into the airborne cloud that combustible-dust standards exist to prevent — so if either is in routine use on a combustible dust, that is a flag on its own. Is fugitive dust recovered with a vacuum that is grounded, bonded and rated for the material and the area classification, or with a standard shop vacuum whose motor sparks by design? The gap between those two is the gap the standards care about.

Has a Dust Hazard Analysis ever been performed for the areas where this dust lives, and if so, is it within its five-year review window? Are the ignition sources near accumulation points — hot surfaces, electrical equipment, static, friction, open flame — actually identified and controlled? If you cannot answer these confidently, the honest next step is a professional DHA. PrestiVac does not perform your DHA, but once you have its findings, our technical team specifies recovery equipment against the material properties and area classifications it identifies — and supply the documentation your action items require.