Lockout–tagout
safety procedure
Lock out, tag out or lockout/tagout (LOTO) is a safety procedure that ensures dangerous equipment is properly shut off and not able to be restarted prior to the completion of maintenance or repair work. It requires that hazardous energy sources be "isolated and rendered inoperative" before work is started on the equipment in question. The isolated power sources are then locked and a tag is placed on the lock identifying the worker and reason the LOTO is placed on it. The worker then holds the key for the lock, ensuring that only that worker can remove the lock and start the equipment. This prevents accidental startup of equipment while it is in a hazardous state or while a worker is in direct contact with it.
Lockout–tagout is used across industries as a safe method of working on hazardous equipment and is mandated by law in some countries.
Procedure
Disconnecting or making safe the equipment involves the removal of all energy sources and is known as isolation. The steps necessary to isolate equipment are often documented in an isolation procedure or a lockout tagout procedure. The isolation procedure generally includes the following tasks:
Announce shut off
Identify the energy sources
Isolate the energy sources
Lock and tag the energy sources
Demonstrate that the equipment isolation is effective
The locking and tagging of the isolation point ensures that others cannot de-isolate the device. Emphasizing the last step, the entire process can also be referred to as lock, tag, and try.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lockout–tagout” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.