Plant Services - April 2008 - (Page 63)

Dodge the sparks Arc flash isn’t just an abstract concept involving electrical safety. When something goes wrong in an electrical panel, the situation can get pretty painful, messy and gory. If you’ve never seen the phenomenon, count yourself lucky. Some five or 10 arc flash incidents occur daily in this country. To learn what can happen when those electrons escape from the wire, charge over to http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm for the video, now on a monitor near you. You’ll see why Michael Furtak from Ferraz Shawmut’s Ontario office wants you to be careful when you open electrical cabinets around the plant. To further his objective, he has a shortcircuit fault current and arc flash hazard analysis Web site – which is found at www.arcadvisor.com. Highlights include “A Handbook to Accompany the Online Short-Circuit Calculation Program” that shows the formulae and reference tables for gathering the electrical data that specifies the appropriate personal protective equipment for working on a particular electrical cabinet. Although the handbook is free, the online calculator and downloadable software aren’t. So, check out the links on the left side. Clicking on “Reference Data” reveals tabular data for substation impedance, cable and bus bar reactance, and data for rotating equipment. “Procedure” gets you the basics of the arc flash calculation based on the IEEE 1584 standard, whereas clicking on “Test Zone” accesses four quizzes about electrical safety. Several of these multiple-choice questions require you to select all the answers that apply, but that fact isn’t obvious. www.ilpi.com, select “Free MSDSs” from the drop-down menu and click “Go!” Avoid sites that require registration. With so much new-found knowledge about chemical dangers, now might be a good time to test your recall of some important principles of hazmat handling. If you’re feeling confident, take the test that ABAG Training Center, Oakland, Calif., developed and offers in its Online Hazmat School. Head over to www.hazmatschool.com/xword/index.html, sharpen your No. 2 pencils and begin the 20-question test. It can be humbling. Safety amid the glassware Some plants maintain on-site laboratories either for research or for a quality-control program. The higher than normal concentration of bottles filled with exotic reagents makes for an environment where peril can hide in plain sight. If your plant has a lab, you might want to let its white-coated denizens know about best practices in laboratory safety. Send them to www2.umdnj.edu to enter the phrase “laboratory safety incidents” in the search box. Zero in on the first citation returned. This page from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey has links to a series of bad-outcome lab errors and provides lessons learned for each. Errors include centrifuge explosion, chemical waste, cryogen explosion, eye injury, gas cylinder incidents, lasers, toxic gas release and ultraviolet burns. After reading some of these, it seems you might be safer out on the plant floor. Using chemicals The standard of living we enjoy is the result of industry using wet nasties, noxious gases and poisonous solids to produce those glorious things we love to buy and use. Although, with certain exceptions, the products for which we trade our greenbacks are perfectly safe if used in the manner the manufacturer intended, the chemicals that went into their making might be a different story. And, the workers on the line who must handle these chemicals have an inalienable right to know that’s been enshrined in law. The vehicle for transmitting vital safety information is the material safety data sheet (MSDS), and a good source is Interactive Learning Paradigms Inc., Blackwood, N.J. The company’s site makes it easy for you to access the MSDS sheets you need. You’ll find more than 100 online resources that provide data sheets covering various subsets of the universe of chemicals. The source with only six entries is relevant for Gulf War veterans. On the other hand, larger databases claim to have more than 1 million entries. Not all return a properly formatted MSDS; but those that don’t at least return data about the chemical of choice. Send your immortal mouse to April 2008 The workers on the line who must handle these chemicals have an inalienable right to know that’s been enshrined in law. The physical plant at Oklahoma State University-Stillwater also posts material about laboratory safety. To access this trove, direct your attention to www.pp.okstate.edu/ehs and click on “Lab & Chemical Info.” While you’re there, you might want to investigate “Manuals & Procedures” for safety concepts to incorporate into your own safety program. The portal Some Web sites in which someone invested many hours are a thing of digital beauty. One such example is the Vocational Information Center, which is brought to you by Kathryn Hake of Phoenixville, Pa. Aimed at vocational and technical education, her site is a comfortable adjunct to the rants about the maintenance crisis we indulge in here at magazine central. Hake’s site fits the definition of a portal, with many 63 www.PLANTSERVICES.com http://www.ilpi.com http://www.hazmatschool.com/xword/index.html http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm http://www.arcadvisor.com http://www2.umdnj.edu http://www.pp.okstate.edu/ehs http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com

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Plant Services - April 2008

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