Overcoming Experience
This Oregon mill has installed a "living" electrical safety program that closely follows the NFPA 70E playbook.
Editor's note: How can a safety manager persuade both corporate management and workers to comply with NFPA 70E, the consensus standard addressing electrical safety requirements for workplaces? Read on to see how Gary McGuire solved the problem. McGuire is safety coordinator at the Newberg, Ore., mill of SP Newsprint Co. (www.spnewsprint.com), which is based in Atlanta, Ga., and produces more than 1 million tons of newsprint annually. He discussed the genesis and development of the mill's 70E compliance program in this June 2, 2005, conversation with Occupational Health & Safety's editor.
What are the elements in your company's 70E program? How many workers does it cover?
Gary McGuire: We've had our 70E program developing since late 2002. We started looking at what we needed to do, and it is evolving as we speak. It's a work in progress. And we have 16 electricians, instrument people, that this process covers. We have instrument shop people, but according to the Oregon License Code, they can only handle up to 90 VA, and that falls outside of the parameters NFPA 70E has laid out.
So it's just these 16 workers who are covered by it. What percentage is that of your site's total workforce?
McGuire: We have 240 hourly, 16 of which are electricians. It extends to our site, which covers many acres. We have many different buildings.
Primarily where this fits into the process is in the MCCs [Motor Control Centers] for each of the departments. Each department has their own building, and they have their own set of MCCs. We have one hogfuel boiler that feeds two generators, and then we have two co-gens that are gas-powered and have 747 turbine engines in them. They produce power through two generators. We produce enough power to run our own site plus power up a small city the size of Newberg. We handle up to 115,000 that is on the line coming into the mill. And what we send out is 115,000 when we sell out.
You run three shifts, and there is always an electrician on duty?
McGuire: We run 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We have no downtime period.
Are these 16 at all times wearing apparel that is 70E-compliant?
McGuire: Yes. The mandatory apparel for them is Category 2, so they wear Category 2 one hundred percent of the time. Depending on the exposure, we go up to Category 4 next, and then anything that is beyond that, we don't do.
I thought the categories only went up to 4. I didn't know there was a higher category.
McGuire: Category 4 is the high one. You can get into wearing the moon suit, but my thought there is that the apparel can save you from the fire, but the concussion of the blast will make your insides jelly. So all you do is preserve the body for burial.
We don't mess with anything like that. Everything gets shut down, or we won't touch it.
As for the tasks your workers engage in that bring them within the ambit of 70E, it's maintenance work?
McGuire: Yes. We do our periodic maintenance, and then there are some installations. Installations are much easier to handle than maintenance because installations are, for the most part, all cold work.
Right, unpowered. I would think so.
McGuire: The maintenance is where you come into the biggest problem. The most frequent exposure that I believe any maintenance electrician has is during lockout. Even though you pull the handle on a Motor Control Center, it's still considered hot until you've proven otherwise. So you have to dress accordingly to protect yourself.
I see what you mean. Of course the obvious strategy is, whenever possible, don't do hot work. What you're saying is you don't do it, but you also have to prepare as if you were.
McGuire: Exactly. We wear the helmet and faceshield. Depending on the voltage, we wear voltage-rated gloves [for] whatever that voltage is. And then the proper test equipment to test for the voltage, to make sure the voltage is not there.
We will test an instrument to make sure that it works before we do verification. Then we do a verification the power is not there. After we do that, then we take the instrument and test it immediately to make sure the instrument is still working.
It sounds like you're very thorough.
McGuire: We've had failures. I've been an electrician since 1965, and so I've seen the full thing. I've pulled [testers] out of my back pocket, checked 'em, they worked, and then I'd go to take another check and then the wire had just broken.
Tell me what started you down the path of 70E compliance in late 2002. Was there an incident that caused you to realize this was necessary?
This article originally appeared in the August 2005 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.