The standard that exists because machines don't know someone's inside.

LOTO compliance rests on a written energy control program with three legs: machine-specific procedures documenting how to shut down, isolate, and verify de-energization of each piece of equipment (including stored and residual energy — hydraulic, pneumatic, gravitational, thermal); periodic inspections in which an authorized employee reviews each procedure at least annually with the people who use it; and training scaled to role — authorized employees who apply locks, affected employees who work around locked-out machines, and everyone else who might wander into the area.

The famous "eight-condition exception" in §1910.147(c)(4)(i) lets employers skip written procedures only when a single energy source can be readily identified and isolated, with no stored energy and no history of accidents — conditions so narrow that most equipment fails at least one. Betting a citation contest on the exception is rarely a winning strategy.

The recurring citation pattern: procedures exist for some machines but not the new line; the annual audit was skipped or documented nowhere; "minor servicing" during production is claimed for work that doesn't meet the routine-repetitive-integral test; and contractors service equipment under a program nobody coordinated. Each maps to a specific paragraph — (c)(4), (c)(6), and the minor-servicing exception's boundaries have generated decades of Letters of Interpretation.

LOTO citations also carry outsized consequences beyond the penalty schedule: hazardous-energy incidents are exactly the kind OSHA refers for willful characterization when the paperwork shows the employer knew.

§1910.147 is a nested-exception minefield — the color-coded outline formatting was practically invented for it. RegLogic attaches the minor-servicing and group-lockout interpretation letters to the paragraphs they interpret, and team notes let a safety department attach its own procedure index — which written procedure covers which machine — directly to (c)(4). New maintenance hires read the rule and the plant's implementation in one sitting.