Grain Entrapment Prevention Symposium to Take Place in St. Louis
Event encourages debate about safety best practices to reduce bin entry deaths
The 2012 Grain Entrapment Prevention Symposium will take place in St. Louis, MO, March 21-23 and involve a broad coalition of 170- 200 attendees from the industry representing grain handling firms, steel bin manufacturers, insurance underwriters, land-grant universities, safety consultants and emergency responders.
This Symposium is NOT about regulatory compliance. It is going to focus upon practical and cost effective ways to make our future grain handling facilities safer and more efficient. We intend to establish safer and more efficient grain handling facilities that will be built in the next three to five years. This symposium is not about trying to retrofit the existing 200,000 to 300,000 bins that have been built in the past 40 years, which would be hugely impractical and cost prohibitive.
Our ultimate goal is to dramatically reduce the number of reported grain entrapments and fatalities, which the industry has been experiencing in the past 20 years.
We estimate that there will be approximately 23 billion bushels of grain storage available in the United States in 2012. Roughly 55% of this total is farm storage and 45 % is off-farm commercial storage. This Symposium will focus on commercial facilities, which are not exempt, as opposed to farm storage, which is exempt in terms of regulatory compliance. For this meeting, we will focus our attention on larger commercial type bins with structured roofs.
Attendees will debate and review best management practices and new design parameters for facilities that will be built after 2012. It is our sincere hope that this “Paradigm Shift” will bring about a significant change which the industry can embrace and support. We wish to address REAL Threats , not Perceived Threats or Regulatory Compliance.
To register and for more information, click here.
