Poor Thinking Cannot Be Defended

Dave Smith has been an Industrial Maintenance Electrician since 1975. He has taught maintenance, troubleshooting and safety courses to thousands of electricians in mines, mills, refineries, factories, plants, power stations and offshore platforms throughout North America and the Middle East. Dave is a hands-on guy and teache...

Poor Thinking Cannot Be Defended

The way to win a court case is to not go to court. This may not be correct if you want to sue someone but if you have had a serious accident, avoiding court is a win. No one wants to have an accident on their watch but as a senior management team you need to ensure that your corporate actions, and those of your subordinates, provide your legal team with a bullet proof case of legal defensibility.

You have two goals after an accident; avoid Criminal Code charges afforded with the passing of Bill C-45 and reduce your provincial health and safety charges. Most successful companies work hard and diligently to provide their work force with the tools and systems to prevent accidents and injuries; if an accident has happened you need to be able to prove that. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the measure we have inherited from our English heritage and that works to your advantage in Criminal Code cases. Provincially, the lack of this standard, coupled with the broad terms of provincial regulations (Thou shalt have no accident!), makes it almost impossible to avoid provincial charges but you want to ensure you reduce the “throw the book at you” charges.

In class after class that I teach, some participant will complain that the due diligence activities of management are just corporate CYA without accepting the fact that management is merely fulfilling their responsibility and at some point, responsibility passes to the workforce. There are few things more horrible than having a work place death so it is imperative that senior management walk the walk in health and safety. If you don’t grease your bearings, your machines will fail; if you don’t protect your workers, they will get hurt; it is all good business – the lack of the latter will cost you far more than the lack of the former.

The problem is that problems occur at the mid management level, under the radar of senior management, and I am seeing these regularly in reference to our new Canadian Workplace Electrical Safety standard, CSA Z462. There are numerous managers selecting parts of the standard that fit their needs and ignoring opposing views.

For instance, since the creation of this standard there has been continuous use of the Task Tables (previously Table 4 and now divided into 4A and 4B), in ignorance of the limitations imposed on their use, both in Z462, and its counterpart, NFPA 70E. The use of these tables is clearly limited by the Parameters at the beginning of each table section which dictate both the maximum short circuit current and the maximum fault clearing times associated with equipment.

Exceeding either maximum renders the tables insufficient to protect your workers and triggers a requirement for an incident energy analysis to determine the proper protection needed. Too many managers are still subjecting workers to unknown protection by claiming that the tables are sufficient when they are not and refusing, or dragging their feet, on the implementation of a proper study.

Another common fallacy is the extent of the Arc Flash Boundary (formerly called the Flash Protection Boundary) when a door is closed or the equipment cover is in place. There is no argument that the AFB of open, energized equipment extends beyond the face of the equipment but too many managers believe that when the door or cover are in place, the AFB stops there.

If the equipment is not designed by the manufacturer to resist an arc flash then the door or cover will merely slow the event by a fraction of a second and parts of these will join the general shrapnel propelled at the worker.

Canada Training Group was fired last year by a facility. I was presenting our Arc Flash – Low Voltage Safety course to their operators. When I reviewed their arc flash hazard analysis it showed 600V switchgear with incident energies of 1800 calories which would be explosive energy equivalent to several sticks of dynamite. Part of the problem was that the engineering firm that performed the analysis had informed the facility management that the AFB was the closed door or cover so their operators were operating this equipment in street clothes as it was not company policy to provide clothing for their operators.

Situations like this are sensitive for our instructors as we want to convey the hazard to the operators yet balance this with the fact that well maintained equipment is unlikely to fail. Unfortunately, experience and research prove that the majority of facilities run this equipment to failure.

I informed the operators that doors or covers of non-arc resistant switchgear cannot be the AFB in an arc flash event as it is well proven that these incidents can instantly reach tens of thousands of degrees of heat, with pressure waves of hundreds or thousands of pounds. In an arc flash incident equipment will experience one of four reactions; there will be no damage, or the enclosure could bulge but the door or cover remains intact, or the door blows open but stays on its hinges, or the door or cover could be blown completely off the equipment. In either of the last two reactions serious damage will be done to any body part hit by shrapnel or pieces of equipment.

Two managers were incensed and their resulting decision was to use a different training consultant in the future. Their reality was that by denying our truth they did not need to outfit their operators in FR clothing. The workers reality was that they were expected to switch hazardous equipment with no protection.

In these instances mid managers are saving the equivalent of pennies while risking limbs, lives and enormous corporate losses with their poor thinking while leaving senior management stranded on an indefensible limb.

 

Until next time, Be Ready, Be Careful and Be Safe.