MattB wrote:
Energized work permits require the approval of management. Who specifically is involved in your energized work permits? How far up the ladder do the signatures go, and at what type of facility?
We are an electrical construction company, have twelve offices across the country and so hence we work in many different situations. Some of them are existing and well known facilities that have coordination and arc flash studies recently completed, others are new to us and are unknown. Still others are ones we have constrcuted, have preliminary studies only (source only) on them and we are ussually only doing testing (start-up) tasks. For any of our permit type tasks we require the person (not our employee) who is requesting the work sign and justify the energized work permit after signing and rejecting a Request for Power Outage document. In-house approval signatures, are based on the level of exposure, but require at a minimum a field manager (Superintendnent or Project Manager) signature, the Safety Manger and a fellow "qualified" person signature. If the exposure is over 8 cal/cm^2 then it requires a Regional Authority (General Manage or V.P. of Copnstruction) signature. This has effectively inhibited much of the "old school" attitude regarding energized work. Nothing is without flaw, so we still have a few "cowboys" who think the rules do not apply to them, but eventually they will go the way of the Dodo bird.
For those situations where the facility is unknown and energized work is justifiable there are five others, led by myself, who do calculations using SKM's Arc Calc to determine the exposures. This has greatly improved our ability to provide professiona, safe service for our customers.
This week I have updated our Electrical Safety Program training manual to comply with the 2012 Standard and will begin this Friday to re-train and update the manuals of the field suprers and our service dept.
