Your cart is currently empty!
In 2010 the ENA published Doc 025 (EG-0) which proposed a new way of assessing earthing-related hazards as quantified risks. Up until this point earthing related hazards were essentially assessed as pass or fail criteria implying safe or unsafe. We will call these traditional methods. EG-0 said instead that an earthing hazard should be seen as representing a quantifiable risk which can be managed as part of a detailed framework which as it happens aligns very well with Australian Work Health and Safety legislation. These will be referred to as risk-based methods.
The problem that we’ve seen through this evolution away from traditional to risk-based is fundamentally that the previous methods were relatively simple to calculate and apply, and the new risk-based methods ‘anecdotally’ are almost impossible to calculate and exceedingly difficult to apply. This, the authors believe, has impacted adoption of EG-0 by industry and has highlighted a wide gap in understanding by practitioners to the point where some earthing designers either do not apply the risk-based methods properly, or choose to revert to traditional methods. Even worse some designers don’t know what to do and flounder somewhere in middle trying to justify their own personal or professional view on the matter.
This paper examines many of these issues and gives detailed guidance to practitioners, designers and asset owners on why the methods proposed in modern publications like ENA EG-0, AS2067 etc can be used objectively in the application of safety criteria. It also debunks the opinions put forward by other practitioners with a view to eliminating the confusion created by some of these parties by explaining the failings of alternative and traditional safety criteria methods.