"It is better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent" Ezra Taft Benson
Before founding Apex Technical Resources, Larry Ziniel spent 34 years working for major U.S. corporations who have strong safety cultures. This instilled in Larry a passion for safety and for partnering with the health and safety staffs to create award winning electrical safety programs. Larry's primary involvements as part of his division's safety team were in two areas:
ELECTRICAL SAFE WORK PRACTICES
The company's corporate EH&S group was highly proactive in recognizing the importance of the NFPA 70E Electrical Safe Work Practices standard and they created early policies to move the corporation towards compliance long before any vendors or contractors had ever heard about 70E. Larry's local division management showed a great willingness to dedicate significant global resources to have a world class program in this area. Over a twelve year period Larry helped to guide a multi-million dollar program that:
- Performed power system and arc flash studies for 17 facilities in North America, Europe, India and Asia
- Prioritized and executed capital projects globally to remediate safety issues and modernize electrical equipment when the studies found potential safety or operational problems.
- Created an NFPA 70E compliant program that included arc flash labeling, purchases of PPE and insulated tools, the creation of safety and testing policies, the creation and execution of qualified and unqualified worker training and awareness programs, the creation of Factory Mutual compliant maintenance programs and the institution of administrative controls to manage the programs at each of the global sites.
- Created a secure database that archived in one location all power system drawings, documentation, safety data, maintenance data and action plans for all of the sites in the division. This database will help to assure future continuity of the electrical safe work practice and power system maintenance programs.
MACHINE SAFETY
The EH&S staff in Larry's division also recognized the importance of the NFPA 79 Electrical Standard for Industrial Machinery. Of key interest to them were the requirements for machine guarding and the control of hazardous energy sources. Larry was a key member of a team that surveyed machine safety systems globally and performed capital projects in the following areas:
- For machines with high levels of inertia (fast, heavy machines that take time to safely come to a zero energy state): interlocks, guards and controls were installed to prevent operators from gaining access to the moving parts of the machines until zero energy states were achieved.
- For large and multi-story machinery (case palletizers, material handling machines, etc.) that required full body access by operators and maintenance people to perform minor interventions such as jam clearing, cleaning and adjustment operations: trapped key systems (Fortress, Kirk, etc.) were installed to prevent bystanders from resetting and restarting machines when the primary operations people who may be out of the line of sight are inside the machines.
- For older machines that did not meet current safety standards: light curtains, improved physical guards and upgraded controls were designed and installed
Apex Technical Resources has a passion for worker safety, continuous improvement and compliance. Please join us in our quest to make industrial and laboratory facilities safe and injury free!
