April 14, 2009

Canadian Standards Association (CSA) Z462 takes safety another step forward

STEPHEN DAFOE

correspondent

EDMONTON

A new 148-page document has many stakeholders confident that greater safety practices can be achieved in the workplace.

The recently introduced Canadian Standards Association (CSA) Z462 addresses electrical safety requirements for workplaces and workers for the installation, operation and maintenance of electrical systems.

“This is going to wonderfully educate the uneducated,” said Shilo Neveu, associate with McLennan Ross LLP, one of three presenters of the best practices for electrical safety seminar held March 17 at Buildex Edmonton, featuring Construct Edmonton.

Neveu, who began his career in the construction trades before switching to law, explained that there has never been anything like Z462 in Canada before and that the document will give health and safety officers an extra tool to do their jobs.

“Arc flash, shock — these are things that are a little bit foreign to health and safety professionals, who aren’t familiar with electrical safety,” he said.

“Now they’ve (the CSA has) given them the documentation to be able to look at and really ask pin-pointy specific questions dealing with hazards under occupational health and safety.”

Neveu explained that Z462 provides detailed information that allows workplace health and safety officers a better idea of what job sites are supposed to do and a better idea if it is actually being done.

“It’s a wonderful role model of what an organization should do,” Neveu said.

The new standard is designed to be used in conjunction with the Canadian Electrical Code (CEC) Parts 1 and 2 (C22.1 and C22.2), and with other related workplace electrical safety standards including CSA-Z460.

One industry professional familiar with the CEC is Ken Unruh of Magna IV Engineering.

He said that electrical safety is getting a lot of attention today, particularly since the introduction of Bill C 45 in 2004.

The bill, a response to the 1992 Westray coal mining disaster in Nova Scotia, added worker safety to the Criminal Code of Canada.

Unruh explained that in the five-year period between 2004 and 2008, there were 178 injuries and 10 fatalities in Alberta related to electricity.

Of those, 88 per cent of the injuries and 50 per cent of the fatalities involved people who were not actually involved in performing the electrical work.

The electrical expert said that industry professionals have been long-aware of the dangers of electrical shock, but that arc flash is gaining attention.

Unruh defined an arc flash as a sustained short circuit through air and explained that a minimum of 208 volts or 10,000 amperes is required to create it.

Even at this low level, the temperature at the point of the arc can reach 20,000 degrees Celsius, sufficient to vaporize copper.

In addition to the arc itself, Unruh said that workers can sustain further damage from the resulting shockwave and shrapnel, as well as the 160 decibels that the arc flash can produce.

Although he said that personal protective equipment (PPE) can go a long way to help reduce injuries, workers need to know the potential hazard level.

Unruh compared a piece of unmarked electrical equipment to an oil and gas employee being asked to work on a process pipe or vessel without knowing what it was filled with.

He explained that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standard 1584 is becoming more and more commonplace in calculating the incident energy of arc flash events.

Using the standard, electrical equipment can be properly marked with warning labels that identify the hazard risks of operating and working on the equipment.

CSA-Z462 is now available from the Canadian Safety Association and the French version will be published in April.

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