Management of Hazardous Energy : Deactivation, De-Energization, Isolation, and Lockout

Extracting lessons learned from hundreds of accident summaries, this book explains the effects of hazardous energy on humans, and discusses the critical role of human factors, including limitations of information processing and sensory overload, on the safe performance of work. It then covers how equipment, machines, and systems operate and are controlled and develops the logic for assessing and managing hazardous energy during production, and in standby and shutdown mode. Simple, logical, practical procedures for deactivation, de-energization, isolation, and lockout are essential for ensuring worker safety and achieving regulatory compliance. The book applies these concepts to different systems in which hazardous energy is present.

Hazardous energy present in systems, machines, and equipment has injured, maimed, and killed many workers. One serious injury can stop the growth of your business in its tracks. Management of Hazardous Energy: Deactivation, De-Energization, Isolation, and Lockout provides the practical tools needed to assess hazardous energy in equipment, machines, and systems, and covers how to manage hazardous energy through elimination or control in order to ensure worker safety and regulatory compliance.

Written in plain English with a minimum of jargon, this book provides safety professionals with the knowledge they need to interact with specialists, designers, and engineers to ensure that appropriate and necessary protocols and safety practices and tools are put into place for assessing the dangers and steps taken to eliminate or control exposure to hazardous energy when needed. Approaching the subject from the bottom up, the author starts at the workplace level, to ensure that the right actions happen for the right reasons.

The book explains a protocol for describing the flow of energy, including transformation and/or storage; for capturing the logic of decisions about control, including failure analysis and contingency planning; and ultimately for creating procedures that are technically sound and defensible. Creating simple procedures for ensuring worker safety and regulatory compliance, the book offers US and international strategies for hazardous energy management and contains examples to illustrate the application of concepts to specific areas.