This guide is not going to answer every question you have, and it doesn’t address every article in 70E. In this Practical Guide To Arc Flash and NFPA 70E, I hope to simplify parts of the standard. The first electrical safety class I was a part of I was the instructor. In the ten years, I worked in factories, my employer never gave me formal electrical safety training. We can no longer work as we did back then, and we have to receive training on electrical hazards. Arc-rated clothing has replaced our polyester shirts, voltage-rated insulated tools have replaced electrical tape, and most importantly, awareness of electrical hazards has replaced our ignorance. We wore polyester shirts and gold chains, and our only PPE was a hard hat, steel-toed shoes and safety glasses.Ī lot has changed in regards to electrical safety and electrical safety training in the decades since. We thought the plastic dipped handles on our Klein lineman’s pliers made them safe. Thirty years ago we wrapped electrical tape around screwdrivers and called them insulated. Stand off to the side, use your left hand, turn your head and it might not hurt to duck a little.” Thanks, Bill.īill said, “When you open or close one of these big disconnects don’t stand in front of it. I was standing off to the side and was not injured. Several years later I was repairing a variable frequency drive when part of it exploded when I closed the breaker. The problem was that in 1984 that advice was the entire arc flash class. Stand off to the side, use your left hand, turn your head and it might not hurt to duck a little.” I asked why and he said, “sometimes these things blow up.” That was good advice then and is still relevant today. Bill said, “When you open or close one of these big disconnects don’t stand in front of it. The information was given as somber advice while we were standing in front of a large disconnect. We didn’t know what happened when panels blew up or that it had a name. It wasn’t called arc flash training because none of us had ever heard that phrase before. I remember when an older electrician named Bill gave me the arc flash training. We were electrical maintenance workers, and management assumed we knew how not to get killed.

That nonchalance undoubtedly caused by a lack of awareness. It’s hard to believe now, looking back, how nonchalant we were about electricity. Electrical work was done live without a second thought.

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