Changes to NFPA 70E® Standard for Electrical Safety in the Workplace® – 2024 Edition

Alright, so let’s go ahead and get started. So before we get too deep into it, let me just say this. The 2024 edition saw far fewer changes than the last several editions of the standard. And in fact, one of the cool things about 70E is in the first couple of pages, before you even get to the table of contents, it actually tells you a little bit of an overview of some of the things that have changed over the last several editions. Now, it’s kind of interesting because, although you might not be able to read this but you can see we’ve got paragraphs and paragraphs that changed over the course of the years. And then for the 2024 edition, it’s one single sentence down in the bottom here. Let me read to you what it says. It says, “Revisions to the 2024 edition were for clarification, usability, and to comply with the National Electrical Code Style Manual.” Course Overview That’s it. That’s as far as the overview goes. That’s all we did. Now, obviously we made more changes than just that. We did have a couple of technical changes, but far fewer than we’ve had in recent editions. And maybe that’s a good thing, you know. If we’re doing it right, then maybe we don’t need to change anything. And maybe the fact that we haven’t changed is evidence that we’re working safer than we ever have. I can tell you, starting about 2007, 2008 or so, the amount of electrical incidents, like fatalities and electric shock incidents, has really dropped precipitously. So, before we start screaming about OSHA and shutting it off and being safe, let’s take just a second and pat ourselves on the back, because guess what? We’re doing things correctly these days. We are really headed in the right direction. So I think the fact that we didn’t have to gut the document, start over, is really evidence of that. A couple of things that did happen: every article now has a scope, which probably should have been the case since forever, but, you know, kind of slipped through the cracks. So now we have article scopes to all of the different articles. We made lots of little editorial revisions. One thing that we did do is we changed the phrase “shock” to “electric shock.” And that’s probably a good thing as well. Now, generally speaking, when we’re talking about a document that provides for electrical safety, we’re probably talking about electrical shock when we say the word “shock.” But we could have been referring to a shock wave that can occur when an arc blast happens. When we have an arc blast, we get a pressure wave, a shock wave. So is that the shock that we were talking about in 70E? Probably not. We probably meant electric shock. So, we made that clarification. The other thing to consider when you go through 70E, one of the things that’s nice is changes are shaded in gray. So, if you’re following along in the book, the changes, for the most part, really do jump off the page and you can see what happened pretty easily.