NFPA Journal - July/August 2018 - 63

GUTTER CREDIT

been inside more marijuana extraction
facilities than just about anyone else
on the planet. In February alone, his
firm submitted 42 separate proposals
to conduct peer reviews, equipment
inspections, or onsite facilities verifications. He or one of his employees is
in perpetual motion from California
to Maine, reviewing and signing off on
marijuana facilities.
He's witnessed a few horrors along
the way. As we talk, Witherell clicks
through photos on his computer,
showing me shoddy setups rigged
with off-brand parts and uselessly
positioned airflow hoods. Some of the
shots illustrate the consequences of
these shortcuts. In one, a man is lying
on a hospital bed with a 12-inch gash
in his forehead, a wound he received
when an extractor exploded and sent
a metal plate flying in his direction,
the result of improperly tightened
valves. In another accident, two men
were left with burns over 90 percent
of their bodies after a gas leak sparked
a fire. He plays me a grainy video of
a woman in street clothes working
on an extraction machine. The room
she's in looks more like a disheveled

office than a processing facility. For
no apparent reason, she turns away
from the machine, and in that moment
the extractor blows its top, sending a
hunk of metal through the ceiling and
releasing a cloud of propane gas into
the room. The woman survived. "There
aren't many incidents, but when they
do happen it is catastrophic," he said.
Many of these events took place
before 2014, when few rules and
little oversight existed for marijuana
facilities in Colorado. Facilities and
equipment are much more sophisticated and safer now as the industry
has matured, Witherell says. But some
safety gaps and the potential for mishaps still remain.
One big problem, Witherell tells me,
is the lack of proper equipment codes
and standards for safety professionals
to reference, and the open-to-interpretation nature of the job can lead to
the approval of shoddy setups. More
than once Witherell has walked into an
extraction room and couldn't believe
an engineer had signed off on it. "I've
seen certified equipment that has been
stamped by another engineer that
doesn't even have an ASME-approved

pressure vessel," he said, referring to
the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers, which approves components. "An equipment standard would
benefit the industry, absolutely. We
need a standard everyone can look to
and say 'this is how it needs to be,' and
there would be no question or room for
interpretation. Now it's totally left up
to someone's judgment."
Other problems include a lack of
skilled architects and engineers willing
or able to work with the industry, as
well as the marijuana industry's own
tendency to treat safety as an afterthought. Even well-informed facility
owners often flunk his field verification
inspection on the first try-"only 40
percent of the equipment we see in
the field is 100 percent correct the first
time," he said.
In instances where Pressure Safety
Inspectors is brought into the process
late, or has been contracted to inspect
an existing facility, serious problems
can still exist, from extraction rooms
that are poorly designed to mitigate
the dangers of hazardous materials to
facility owners who, maliciously or not,
are a little too relaxed with equipment
design and processes. Manufacturers
with approved extractors purposefully
alter them with components and addons from overseas, or even repurposed
home brewing equipment, because
they've read positive online reviews
and want to give it a try in an effort to
follow some new fad or just to experiment. In some cases, they use approved
equipment in novel or unapproved
ways, or unwittingly buy components from China with forged ASTM
approved stamps, Witherell said.
When I visited in the spring, extracting under extreme cold was all the
rage among Colorado's marijuana concentrate manufacturers, who believe
low temperatures produce a better
product. Witherell says it's typical for
manufacturers to bring the solvent temperatures down to -90 degrees F, even
though valves and components are only
rated to -30 degrees F. "We walk in and
the whole column has a big chunk of
ice buildup around it," which can cause
the components to become brittle and
vulnerable to failure, Witherell told me.
N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - July/August 2018
