Forestry Fatality Rate Climbing
Thursday, August 29, 2013 @ 3:59 AM
Prince George, B.C. – There has been another fatality in the forestry sector.
On the weekend, a 41 year old Saltspring Island man, working as a faller near Lake Cowichan, died when he was struck by a falling tree.
Forest Safety BC released a safety alert late yesterday confirming this death, and that of a grader operator on the Stone Creek Forest Service Road , as direct forestry deaths. That brings the number of fatalitites in the forestry sector in B.C. in 2013 to 8. That number is creeping up on the number of fatalities for all of 2012 when 10 people died in forest harvest work.
The year to date number of fatalities would have been ten had it not been for the reclassification of a couple of cases. In one case, where a worker fell off the tracks of a buncher, the Coroners’ Service has determined the worker died of natural causes. In the other case, which involved a water truck driver, the matter has been reclassified as having a core activity of transmission line installation and not forestry.
When it comes to tracking safety in the sector, BC Forest Safety Council CEO Reynold Hert, says fatalities by themselves are not a great indicator "But we look at them because they are such a significant and impactful event." He says in reality, if a tree is 6 inches further one way and totally misses the faller, 6 inches the other way and you have a fatality, "We kind of look at the underlying trends beyond that, in terms of serious injuries, lost time injuries and the number of claims being filed with WorkSafe. We’ve seen those numbers flatten out over the past number of years, so we were making good improvement in bringing those trends down." He says when there is a death on the job, "They are such a major loss, they really make people sit up and take notice."
He believes there are a couple of factors at play: " One, the industry has gotten more active. The markets are coming back and level of cut has gone up a little bit, so they’re calling back people who haven’t been working for a while, who may not have been through this whole culture change that’s been going on and may not be caught up fully, or they have hired some new people who are coming into the industry." He says the other factor is that the basic safety course needs to be refreshed, "It’s like anything,
if you are working under one thing for a long time, you can start to take things for granted. so there is actually an industry group in place that is overhauling the SAFE Certification System right now. We’re planning on sharing the first version of that overhaul with the industry in late September."
Still, Hert says there is significant progress being made in making the forest harvesting sector safer for all involved, "Like all things you would like it to go faster, but the culture is changing significantly."
"You know not only is unsafe unacceptable, unsafe is a sign we are not as good as we can be as operators. When we are out there to do logging and someone happens to be seriously injured, that’s not what we intended to be doing. It means there is an opportunity to get ourselves sharper at what we’re really there to do, and then send everyone home every night."
Comments
Instead of counting the people died per year in the industry. How about tracking it against the number of man days. This will give a better ratio.
WorkSafeBC does have that information. However, the fatalities knowledge is virtually instantaneous while the number of hours worked is not compiled on a day to day basis. That information is not available until well after the year is over.
So, we will get a much better picture of what happened in 2013 sometime in 2014.
While these Safety courses are important, there are other factors that cause safety issues. Long hours and long commutes play a huge role not to mention Drug and Alcohol abuse. I am not suggesting that it was a cause for any of these workers that have died recently, but I know these are huge problems that are ignored. I think that the companies themselves should be made to be more accountable for these factors. Forest Safe and WorkSafe BC and whoever else is “governing” ( for lack of better word) this industry are really not getting to the core of the problem.
True enough Gus, The speed that Worksafe BC works on the analysis of a pandemic of incidents in a sector, it will be right on time.
Any fatality is horrible. but if 10 people died after 200,000 mandays, compared to 8 people after 200,000 mandays is a different stat.
“Reynold Hert, says fatalities by themselves are not a great indicator..”
How much more of an indicator do you need?? Statements like this show just how lax forestry managment is on the issue.
“….if 10 people died after 200,000 mandays, compared to 8 people after 200,000 mandays is a different stat”
Actually the shorter one makes the period over which a rate like that is taken the greater will be the peaks and valleys.
5, 10, 15 year periods will show a trend. One year will do zilch. Five years may show you what you want to believe in until the sixth year stat will tell you differently.
The trend has been downward for the long period. We may just be getting another bit of a spike, certainly not likely to be as great as 20+ as it was over 5 years ago.
As far as training goes, I agree that there are many other factors which are as important and even more important.
The thing is that training is an easy one to point to and easy to do. To follow up and determine whether training was the cause of any improvement is a much more difficult task.
Creating better roads, whether regular highways or forestry and industrial roads certainly will help.
Right now, for instance, they are slowly creating 4 lane sections going south on 97. If traffic will ever pick up on them they will regret not creating a median which would virtually wipe out head on collisions. I think taking up the extra real estate would be well worth the bit of extra cost. Soft median barrier could be put up over time as traffic volume picks up.
Short term thinkers everywhere in this part of the world.
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