There is increasing demand for practical groundings for small-area substations because of the recent revision of Korea"s Electrotechnical Regulations, which necessitates the method of evaluating their safety. This paper proposes a practical mesh grounding system for 22.9kV substations and studies how to evaluate its safety. The proposed grounding system is proved to obey the safety criteria of ANSI/IEEE Std. 80 via ANSI/IEEE Std. 80 method and computer simulation.