You work for an electrical services firm, and your crew is doing some switchgear-related jobs during a maintenance shutdown. Due to a mistake by one of your crew, your work is now behind schedule. You'll need another 90 minutes before you'll be ready to remove your lockout/tagout, but the outage window is supposed to close in one hour. All of the work must be completed, so skipping something to make up the lost time isn't an option.
The plant engineer is noticeably nervous, because operators will be arriving soon and production expects to have the equipment. He asked if you can work any faster, and you told him trying to do that earlier is why you are behind now.
“The clock is ticking, and I need a solution,” he says. He tells you he'll delay payment and seek a late performance penalty if he has to delay start-up by much more than an hour. You know his overloading of the schedule with too much work combined with his poor preparation could be readily documented, but you don't want to get into a dispute.
You try to put this out of your mind so you can focus on the work. Though you are the crew foreman, you also carry tools and are doing your best to reduce the schedule over-run.
Now the plant engineer approaches you and says he has found a way to significantly reduce the amount of time the job runs over. He says he noticed all the locks and tags on various disconnects and breakers. Rather than wait while each crew member unlocks his individual lock, why not take off all the locks except one on each hasp? And do it now, in parallel with the work. They can all work off that one lock and tag per device.
The circuits would still be locked out, so no danger of energization. He even promises to “keep an eye on things” as the final lock is removed at each point.
This solution relieves the pressure and would make this customer happy. But it violates a core principle of LOTO. The system isn't there to protect a crew per se, but to protect each individual member of the crew. That's why OSHA says, “The lockout device is under the exclusive control of the authorized employee performing the service or maintenance.” [1910.147(c)(4)(i)(6)].
If this guy wants to help, he can grab a rag and start wiping off tools. Or he can assign a plant electrician to help perform tool counts and bolt covers back on, working not independently but at the direction of one of your crew members. What he should not do is shortcut the safety procedures that must be performed. And regardless of the pressure, you cannot agree to let him do it.
