Debbie Mitchell is the NAHAD Standards Manager for the association’s Hose Safety Institute. I spoke with her about the group at this year’s NAHAD Convention in Colorado Springs a few weeks ago.
“The Hose Safety Institute is an organization within NAHAD that is available for both distributor and manufacturer members of NAHAD to join. It’s focused on the Hose Assembly Guidelines, which is a body of knowledge around the design, specification, and fabrication of hose assemblies—the best practices,” she said. “It has been under development since the early 90s, and we’ve been refining them ever since. We ask members to do business in accordance with the Hose Assembly Guidelines. We have a series of tests for people to take, basically testing their knowledge of those guidelines.”
Mitchell said it is not a formal certification, and in fact, the tests are open book. They have five separate tests on the handbook, which focus on design and specification of hose assemblies.
“The handbook is actually available to anyone who wants to buy one—it’s a great body of knowledge,” she said. “We also have online fabrication guides, which discuss how distributors actually do the fabrication processes for hose assemblies. Those are available only to institute members, and we also have a series of five tests on those. These are also open book tests—we want to just make sure people know where to find the information and how to find it—not memorize all of the stuff.”
The two main focuses of the Institute are to provide employee development and recognition, since the group send out certificates for employees who take and exam and pass it.
“One of our primary focuses right now is to drive as hard as we can to get recognition in the end user world,” Mitchell said. “We have an advisory council as part of the Institute, which are end users with a vested interest in hose safety within their industry, such as safety managers. We’ve started creating a series of white papers around specific issues in the end user community. Most of these focus on areas where there is significant threat if the hose assembly fails—such as worker injuries or damage to the environment.
The white papers are downloadable for free at the NAHAD website at nahad.org.
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