Industries want to ditch inspection rule

Bills would stop local building inspectors from checking electrical equipment

GLEN RAVEN -- Allen Gant Jr. says his textile company is so fanatical about safety that anybody -- down to the guy who sweeps the brightly colored fuzz off the floor -- can hit the "STOP" button on any machine in his plant without repercussion if there's a danger. The shortest blip can cost Glen Raven Mills' yarn-making operation thousands of dollars.

A couple of years ago, Gant learned that somebody else could stop his machines, too, when the local building inspector noticed they didn't bear the mark of Underwriters Laboratories Inc. or some other outside testing agency to certify they were safe.

"The inspector said, 'I'm sorry. You can't start the equipment,' " Gant recalls.

Gant's machines, and the 12 people he had hired and trained to run them, were idled for two months while he found an electrical engineer who could disassemble the machines and switch out the parts that didn't meet national and state electrical codes.

As equipment manufacturing continues to be taken over by companies in Europe and Asia, American businesses must shop overseas for the machines they need. But some business owners and economic development officials say the state's safety inspection laws make installation of foreign-made products too costly and cause North Carolina to lose employers to less persnickety states.

Building inspectors in cities and counties across North Carolina can check every coffee maker, MRI machine and furniture lathe that connects to a building's electrical supply. If it hasn't been approved by an independent testing lab, the company generally must replace it or hire an electrical engineer to certify it is safe.

Legislators introduced a half-dozen bills this year to take away local building inspectors' authority to examine electrical equipment as part of the process of determining whether a building is ready to occupy. One has passed the Senate and awaits action by the House.

Opponents, such as Insurance Commissioner Jim Long, who as state fire marshal oversees building inspectors, say machinery must be inspected to prevent catastrophic workplace injuries. Just as American consumers are learning about the sometimes lax standards in foreign-made pet food and pharmaceuticals, inspectors say they are seeing imported equipment that could electrocute workers, start fires or blow up.

It's just a matter of time, said Danny Thomas, chief electrical inspector for Durham City-County.

"We're going to have some family and friends exposed to some conditions that could hurt 'em," Thomas said.

But businessmen such as Gant say it's in those foreign manufacturers' interests to design and build equipment to be as safe as possible. Once a machine arrives, and its thousands of parts are assembled by engineers from the company that built it, he says, it's ludicrous to suggest that an Underwriters Laboratories label is going to make it safer.

Gant's encounter with what inspectors call the "L&L" requirement, for labeling and listing, cost him plenty.

The machines were part of an expansion of Glen Raven Mills' operation in the town of Glen Raven, near Burlington, where Gant's grandfather started the company in 1880. What began as a small cotton mill is now an international specialist in high-performance fabrics. One of the company's signature products is Sunbrella outdoor fabric, woven in Anderson, S.C., from yarn spun at plants in Glen Raven and elsewhere that run 24 hours a day.

The global fabric

To feed the mill in Anderson, Gant expanded Glen Raven and installed several nearly-new spinning machines bought from a closed-down yarn-maker in Henderson. The state-of-the-art machines take bulk acrylic fiber dyed in the cheerful colors of shop awnings and cafe umbrellas and stretch it into slender yarn. About 120 feet long and fully automated, all they require of an attendant is to walk around and make sure the mechanical arms and whirring bobbins are moving as they should. An interruption of just one second can ruin the yarn.