NFPA 70E – 2009 Changing Standards For Workplace Policies

While upgrades to personal safety equipment and increased vigilance on the part of workers is critical to maintaining an injury-free workplace, it must not be forgotten that creating an atmosphere where safety can flourish is often in large part in the hands of risk managers and the policies that they enact at their respective organizations.  In recognition of this fact, NFPA 70E-2009 makes some important changes to the way that managers must approach electrical safety.

Electrical safety programs must now be audited on a regular basis, with the frequency of those audits being determined by risk managers.  This is on top of additional arc flash hazard updates which now must be undertaken in the event that the work area in question is either renovated or otherwise modified in a major way.  Even if no changes have been recently made, every five years an arc flash analysis must be performed again in order to ensure that it is up to date. This is largely due to the fact that changes occurring elsewhere in a facility’s electrical system can impact voltages in ways that may have not been predicted in the original spec or analysis.

Training for employees working with high voltages has also been expanded and clarified in order to introduce a more comprehensive level of safety.  Anyone exposed to shock hazards must be given CPR training that is subject to annual employer certification. Equipment labeling changes have also been enacted in order to inform those workers interacting with charged circuits as to the level of personal protective equipment required in their presence, as well as the level of incident energy present in the equipment involved.  In order to remove any doubt regarding the voltages being worked on, risk managers must ensure that their employees can demonstrate a clear knowledge of how to operate voltage-detectors².  This enables them to adequately prepare for their assigned work from a safety perspective.

Furthering this trend towards clearer lines of communication regarding the presence of high voltages, contractors that could conceivably come into contact with charged circuits covered by the NFPA 70E-2009 regulations now need to informed of the risks involved by facility managers and then transmit that information to each employee working on-site. All workers, regardless of who they report to, are also now required to remain aware of any potential high voltage situations that could be encountered as a result of task changes that take their work outside its original scope¹.

On the administrative side, a further provision states that that risk managers are also responsible for documenting employee training, in order to provide an audit trail for OSHA should investigation of a safety incident be required.

Many of these new standards are common sense, and have been implemented in a number of workplaces for many years.  Be that as it may, it never hurts to have a codified set of guidelines to turn to when crafting or reviewing electrical safety policies, which is exactly what NFPA 70E-2009 provides.