One of my service accounts has hired a safety person. During his plant walk through, his report states that the light fixture located in the room that the main natural gas line enters the building needs to be an intrinsically safe / explosion proof light fixture. FYI this is a steel plant, the gas line and a light are the only things in the room. Either he is wrong, or I was unaware that the area that natural gas enters a building is classified as a hazardous location. Please give me your input or any code reference you know of that I can show their safety guy to avoid my service customer having to purchase an expensive, unnecessary light fixture for a gas room. Or let me know if I'm wrong!! Thank you for your input.
Not sure which plant your at, Great Lakes, Zug Island, or the old Rouge Steel which is now Severstal North America/ U.S. Steel partnership I think.
But I can tell you this with U.S. Steel it's all about safety and they go over board on everything, I work at the Gary works on the south BF's, and almost all our lights are explosion proof, in most cases though they use them to keep out the dust and moisture so they will last longer as they are better sealed, I agree with rbalex and the others that the location most likely is not a classified location, but your going to find that changing their minds can be a hard battle to fight, classifying a location is a engineering job and many knowing how this company works will error on the safe side, also we do not install any fixtures with exposed lamps except some high bay types in in some of the warehouses, but anything around the furnaces are mostly sealed HID type fixtures that are explosion proof rated, in my short time of experience I found that the environment out there can even corrode stainless steel (we have a bunch of it) and even rob roy wont stand up to it, kind of funny to find rob roy that looks like its brand new but the metal inside has all but been corroded away to the point you can just squeeze it because the metal is gone, just the PVC coating is left.
If you think about it, if gas lines running into a building makes it a classified location then we have allot of buildings that are in trouble as gas lines can be found in many buildings even in most all kitchens, but we never see any classified location tagged for them do we? most relief valves or regulators should be vented to the out side but as we know many are not, but in a normal condition I would find it hard to believe that enough gas would be vented (normally) to cause a high enough LEL to become a hazard, but in these highly corrosive environments anything is possible and designing on the safe side is not a bad idea if you think about it, and it could be this point that this safety inspector could be thinking about in classifying this location???
If this was a job you bid to do, I would just issue a change order and go with the flow, and make money while your at it.
Also welcome to the forum
