Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2010 9:08 am Posts: 2178 Location: North Carolina
Use Annex H instead as far as PPE selection. It works the same but since the input is incident energy rather than a PPE Level, it is directly compatible with IEEE 1584.
Don't forget you still have to do a risk assessment. The first table in the table based method is a risk assessment. There is a similar table given in the annexes of OSHA 1910.269. There are risk assessment standards but using either the table in 70E or the one in 1910.269 is a great starting point. There are plenty of dumb risk assessments out there. Here are three great examples:
Operators at a power plant are responsible for locking out equipment to ensure that it isn't energized. Maintenance personnel are expected to simply put their lock onto the crew lock box established by the operator and trust/hope that nothing bad happens. Operators are made responsible for the "safe" operation of the plant and get fired if anything goes wrong. Operators use a tic to test for absence of voltage so they wave it around in the vicinity of the equipment with the doors closed. In my defense I played with them a little bit when I asked the guy to wave his tic close to the top of the cabinet to make sure nothing live is hiding up there and predictably it went off as it passed within inches of a fluorescent light fixture.
Firestone safety generalists decided that the company simply would not do any energized work or contract out any energized work. Thats great except how does one do an electrical LOTO without doing a test for absence of voltage, which is energized work/
PotashCorp safety generalists decided that they would simply wear arc flash PPE for all electrical tasks, no matter what it is. Even operating a breaker. Taken to the extreme though this would include operating any button or switch. And they refused to recognize incident energy...everything was 40 cal/cm2 suits no matter what the hazard (even above that). Part of the reasoning is because production personnel flat out refused to allow proper maintenance to be done on electrical equipment, so the safety generalists simply declared all electrical equipment to be inherently dangerous due to unknown state of maintenance.
Once popular: according to 70E prior to 2009 arc flash hazards occur when there is exposed energized equipment. Do whatever you want with the doors closed.
A popular approach in Europe and Australia: equipment manufacturers are responsible for making equipment safe to operate without risks. Buy everything in arc resistant varieties and simply ignore the risk.
The consequence of a lot of these dumb risk assessments is that electricians are either severely at risk, or they are forced to adopt a requirement to have a 2 man approach to performing energized work. One actually does the work in the safest and best way possible (they are left to their own interpretation of what this is), and the second watches for the boss and they stop work if anyone approaches. This is actually how work gets done at two of the examples I just gave.
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