
Wes Maertz
Wes (Wesley) Maertz, CSP, CIT, is a field safety professional and technical safety specialist at W.W. Grainger with 30 years of EH&S experience.
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Sep 27, 2026
Electrical Safety Standards 101: What You Need to Know about NFPA 70B and 70E
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8:35Scott FowlerHOST
So going a little deeper into that topic, Wes, I'm curious, how does the condition of electrical equipment as addressed in 70B influence those risk assessments required by 70E?

Wes MaertzGUEST
So many of us, if you go onto YouTube, we've all done training on electrical safety, and one of the things that we all put into our training is one of those dramatic videos.

Wes MaertzGUEST
You see somebody racking a breaker, turning a switch, and all of a sudden you have a big fireball in front of you.

Wes MaertzGUEST
And most of you, probably what you've seen, or if you've done incident causation analysis on these, or you can just look at the video you can tell it's a failure of the equipment the equipment it because it is mechanical in nature so mechanical switches can fail and they will fail uh in there so where 70b comes into play it really talks to the condition of that equipment so you know if you establish and maintain it through 70B, the guidelines that are laid out that Jordan talked about in the requirements, that directly dictates the likelihood of a failure and the overall safety calculations that play into the 70E.

Wes MaertzGUEST
So Jordan had mentioned earlier, when you do a formal arc flash risk assessment, when you do an incident energy analysis, what plays into that directly is the number of cycles, you know, the condition of the equipment.

Wes MaertzGUEST
So on the equipment itself, you have the specs, the manufacturer specifications.
13 MINS LATER
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22:46Scott FowlerHOST
And Wes, I'm curious, you know, what maintenance records or documentation from a 70B program are most valuable, you know, for safety professionals to show that they're in compliance with 70E and they're, you know, taking those steps that they should be taking to address these hazards?