Five Fundamental Flaws Commonly Encountered in Distillery DSEAR Reports
- Oliver Kitson
- Oct 23
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 31
The Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations 2002 is the UK’s implementation of the European Union’s Directives on Explosive Atmospheres (ATEX 153 and ATEX 114) which are derived from IEC 60079 International Standards for Explosive Atmospheres that has also been implemented without national variation in many other countries including Japan, Brazil and Australia.
DSEAR is intended to protect not only employees at the workplace, but also other persons on site whether at work or not who may be at risk from dangerous substances. This includes employees working for other businesses, visitors to the site and other members of the public. Therefore the legislation covers everyone storing dangerous substances even if they have no employees of their own.
Reasons to get is right:
Reputation within industry and local community
Protect investment capital and business assets
Insurance validity may be compromised
HSE can prosecute personally, and liability is not limited
Duty of care to staff and visitor’s livelihood and wellbeing
DSEAR mandates that an assessment be carried out regarding processing and storage of dangerous substances on site which may cause fire or explosion including combustible powders, reactive chemicals such as oxidising agents, gases under pressure and substances that are corrosive to metals. However not all assessments are carried out correctly, and flaws can have considerable consequences given the nature of the materials involved. Here I will outline the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.
1) Three Main Requirements
A business must cover three main areas in their explosion protection documentation as outlined in EU Directive 1999/92/EC, which in the UK are mandated by DSEAR 2002. These can be dealt with in separate reports or altogether.
Hazardous Area Classification
Risk Assessment & Controls
Emergency Response Plan
Regulation 7 of the DSEAR regulations outlines the requirements to assess the facility, processes, and substances to determine the appropriate characteristics and to then determine the Hazardous Area Classification.
Regulation 5 of the DSEAR regulations requires employers to carry out a risk assessment to identify potential sources of danger from dangerous substances in the workplace, and to take appropriate measures to eliminate or reduce those risks to an acceptable level. This includes ensuring that any equipment, systems, and procedures used in the workplace are designed, constructed, and maintained to be safe and suitable for their intended use, and that appropriate training and information is provided to workers to enable them to work safely with dangerous substances.
Regulation 8 outlines the arrangements required to plan, prepare, and deal with accidents incidents and emergency situations. Emergency response planning and preparedness systems should be determined and regularly tested to ensure effectiveness. Regulation 11 expands on this by defining the duty to coordinate site emergency arrangements.
2) Copying
I will start by saying it is okay to use generally accepted industry references such as those outlined in IP 15. However, it is not okay to blindly use hazardous area zoning from other reports where the properties of the substances including the strength of the alcohol or how the equipment is being used differs. This includes using a still manufacturers zoning diagram as a template.
Still manufacturers sometimes produce zoning diagrams in their documentation to meet EU legislation as they often incorporate non ATEX equipment such as solenoids and temperature sensors into the design. By producing a zoning diagram and demonstrating that no sources of ignition will be created even in a malfunction state they are able to self-certify the equipment as meeting the regulations if the points of the release within the vicinity of the non ATEX items are zone 2, secondary class releases or nil.
This is done with the disclaimer that it does not pertain to how the still will be used by the customer. The manufacturer does not include information on additional zones that may be created by operators using the still in different ways such as opening the man door post filling to add extra ingredients or the surrounding environment the still is operating within including other process equipment, storage and blending tanks, bunds etc that may produce adjacent zones. Above you can see the differences between a manufacturers zoning and a hazardous area classification of the same distillery in situ performed in accordance with IEC 60079.
A supplier will also be unlikely to assess the level of ventilation in the stillhouse which forms part of all zoning calculations as this is specific to that site and will change the extent of the hazardous areas generated by a vapour release or a spillage of flammable spirit. Ambient temperature will also affect the flammability which is why Australia defined spirit above 60%ABV as being packing group II in its Dangerous Goods Code not 70%ABV like in Europe. Below is a diagram showing what effect a change of local ventilation and spillage control has on the extent of hazardous areas. Below you can see the effect ventialation has on zoning extents with the zone 1 area significantly reduced potentially negating the need for more expensive ATEX ancillaries.
3) Competency
IEC 60079 from which most legislation is derived globally stipulates “the hazardous area classification should be carried out by persons who understand the nature of the flammable substances, gas dispersion and ventilation and are familiar with the process aspects for the plant under consideration. The competency of the person should be relevant to the nature of the plant and methodology used for carrying out the hazardous area classification.”
A competent person therefore is someone who when scrutinised can demonstrate knowledge of the applicable legislation, expertise of how to apply a code such as IP 15 or equivalent to classify and calculate the zone extents, has a level of understanding of how the distillery operates to underpin it all and crucially a degree of objectivity.
Expertise: Education and experience are vital to be able to carry out the assessment. There are courses for those who have not undertaken higher education in science or engineering in how to follow a code such as IP 15 Area Classification code for installations handling flammable fluids in order to classify hazardous areas and also in how to specify equipment safety levels. The author of the report should also have knowledge of in risk management and be able to identify suitable control measures, again with reference to official standards, and make recommendations of what ancillaries should be implemented for the distillery.
Understanding: Operational experience in the sector of the business being assessed can be vital. This is slightly subjective but a single day site visit to a distillery by someone who hasn’t worked as a distiller before is unlikely to give them enough time to grasp how the equipment is being operated, where all the potential release points of flammable substances are located, what form they will take and how to effectively reduce the overall risk. The requirement for a greater calibre of plant specific expertise increases exponentially with the size and complexity of the distillery.
Without naming names, I have seen several DSEAR reports carried out by independent consultants for well-known brands that are fundamentally flawed. The persons carrying out the assessments were qualified in areas such as fire safety, but it is clear they didn’t understand how the stills were being operated, this meant that points of release such as breather vents and PRVs were missed on both sites. For one report the consultant didn’t know to even apply a code to calculate the hazardous areas and so the zones were guesswork.
Objectivity: I advise founders not to carry out their own assessment as they are marking their own homework and no matter how scrupulous and well intentioned, they might be, there is a clear conflict of interests with their wallet. An operational employee may be suitably qualified and experienced though they should seek another similar but perhaps not identically experienced peer, preferably outside their team, to review. I worked for a company with a genius founder who did produce their own report. The only zones were internal to the stills and were classed as zone 2, which cannot be correct, and the only protection measures identified for explosion risks were a spill kit and fire extinguisher!
4) Analysing Risks
Regulation 6 of DSEAR identifies the requirement to manage risk, adopting suitable action and control measures, applying a principle of hierarchy of control to eliminate hazards and risk where practicable and manage or mitigate risk thereafter. This means that each individual risk should be assessed, and suitable controls be determined by analysis to ensure they are bringing the risk level down to an acceptable level for each hazard. A few paragraphs of waffle and a no smoking sign are not sufficient.
A risk assessment should outline each process step and relevant release points identified, assess the risk and prescribe suitable controls to make the risk acceptably low. Sometimes this is confused with As Low As Reasonably Practical, however that assumes the risk is not at an unacceptably high level still. For instance, if the risk is a potentially fatal event every 10’000 hours, then that is clearly not acceptable; changes must be made to reduce the risk, “I can’t afford it” is not an option!
If the risk is a low consequence and low likelihood then there may then be a rationale for apportioning spend elsewhere that brings the overall risk level of the site down significantly further, however without an analysis being performed no decision can be sufficiently justified.
5) Check and Renew
This is probably the most simple and obvious and yet I know it can’t have been done every time because of the glaring errors I have uncovered in the reports I have become privy to. When you first receive any risk assessment or policy including a DSEAR report you should check it. Has the author met all the requirements listed above? Have they outlined all activities carried out as part of the processes. Have they identified all points of release and sources of spillage. Do you agree with the report? You have paid for it so make sure it’s right!
Every time there is a change relating to the equipment within the operational area, including the adoption of new procedures the report should be updated to reflect this change. In addition, the report should be checked periodically to ensure that risk creep has not occurred, and current processes are in line with those outlined as the basis of safety when the hazardous area classification and risk assessment were undertaken.
If you’d like a free DSEAR safety self-audit checklist head to the Checklist Tab to request your copy.
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