Justification for working live

Can anyone provide justification for working live other than voltage testing and troubleshooting. I have heard of the examples of life-sustaining equipment (medical related) but can't think of others.

Are there any instances on a University Campus that would necessitate live work? I've been told we need to maintain power to our research labs, but that does not seem to meet the criteria set forth in 70E.

Have any of you developed pre-determined justifications for energized work?

Thanks

Good question, some other reasons are things that cannot be done while de-energized, like IR scanning for example. Things that would put the public in danger, working on a nuclear safety related system comes to mind.

I have always told my clients this, if you end up in court from a injury or death case from not truning iff the equipment, will the judge and/or jury agree with you that it was justifiable?

I have done many outages at university research labs, they have always been done de-energized. Took a bunch of planning, heard a lot of grumbling, and usually had a short window to get the work done before the "Cryogenically frozen cancer cure defrosted", or whatever it was they had up there. Even saw a professor come to the substation and scream at the facilities engineer once, that did not go over too well.

OSHA and the NFPA-70E require live parts to which an employee may be exposed to be de-energized before associates work on or near them. There are only three exceptions to this rule:
· De-energizing the parts introduces additional or increased hazards
· De-energizing is infeasible due to equipment design or operational limits
· Equipment operates at less than 50V

Examples of additional hazard would be an interruption of life support systems, emergency alarms, ventilation of hazardous locations or removal of illumination.

An example of infeasibility is work on circuits that form an integral part of a continuous industrial process that would otherwise need to be completely shutdown to permit work on one circuit or piece of equipment.

Removal of illumination has been removed.

Discrepancy between OSHA & 70E

Thanks, good to know.

So 29 CFR 1910.333(a)(1) is now wrong since the NFPA-70E has been revised?