Importance of Hazardous Area Classification

Hazardous locations are typically found in most of the production plant having large facilities like chemical and petrochemical processing, refineries, storage tanks, warehouses and other similar areas, which have the potential risk of explosion or fire due to explosive mixtures of vapors or dusts.

While most technical personnel, who work in such areas, or in designing and maintaining hazardous installations, they should be aware of hazardous areas and the risks involved.

It is very well known that the lack of awareness, amongst many people in design, engineering, maintenance and operation in industry today, regarding hazardous area classification and protection methods and standards will cause the followings:

Poor or insufficient area classification increases costs and decreases safety.

• Simply, it is declaring an area as hazardous when it is not. How does increase costs? By forcing you to buy and maintain expensive explosion proof equipment when an ordinary weatherproof equipment one would have been just good.

• Secondly, since the area is anyway not hazardous, you are paying more for safety that you do not need.