Canadian Biomass • Summer 2019 • Serious about safety

Despite frequent laughs shared by attendees at the annual Wood Products Safety Summit held in Prince George, B.C., in June, it was clear safety is serious business for the industry.

Nearly 100 attendees came to the event, which covered many bases, from ways to create a safety culture, to technical combustible dust presentations, and a powerful keynote on working in an unsafe environment.

The idea of a creating a company safety culture is nothing new, but how to go about effectively doing that has its challenges. Pinnacle’s director of health and safety, Steven Mueller, gave the summit’s first presentation on how the pellet producer created a culture of “owning safety.”

Key to their success, Mueller said, is their in-house Safety Champions Academy program that aims to build and reinforce safety culture from the ground up. The program recruits safety leaders for safety training in Prince George. By the end of 2019, nearly 60 safety champions will graduate from the program.

WorkSafeBC’s Gordon Harkness also spoke about building a corporate safety culture, which he says always begins with management. “Safety culture is either driven or dragged by senior management,” he said.

• A workplace health and safety climate survey, which measures immediate employee feelings towards safety.

• An evaluation of OHS practices, which involves site tours, program reviews, and document and compliance reviews.

• And direct commentary from the workforce, in the form of written responses or interviews from the employees.

Kevin Ericsson with Cariboo Biomass Consulting has been involved in several incident investigations on dryer fires. His presentation on best practices for managing combustible gas offered warnings for typical maintenance mishaps or oversights that can lead to a fire.

Dryers are at the greatest risk of explosion, he said, when there is a sudden, unexpected power outage; during a scheduled shutdown process; when dryer components fail; when there is faulty fire protection equipment; or when there are distracted operators.

Formal training is needed for dryer operators on the fire safety systems, Ericsson said. Suppliers should provide the documents, but operators should be able to prove they’ve learned the material.

Cherie Whelan with the BC Forest Safety Council presented on challenges and methods to get to “lessons learned” as an industry.

An important step is for companies to assess and determine which workplace incidents qualify as “serious injury fatality potential” or SIFp. To identify SIFp, companies can follow an incident management process that involves four steps: notification and reporting; assessing risk and consequences; investigation and causal analysis; and corrective and preventative actions, follow-up and lesssons learned.

The summit’s guest speaker offered attendees a cautionary story of the consequences of an unsafe work environment.

Spencer Beach, a flooring installer in Edmonton, was removing linoleum from an under-construction home with a strong, flammable chemical when the house was engulfed in a flash fire. The chemical fire reached 1,500 degrees, burning 90 per cent of his body in third and fourth degree burns.

Beach said he knew, deep down, working with that chemical was unsafe. “How many of you have been in a situation where you have the gut feeling, and you do nothing at all?” he asked the audience. “But I did what all strong, hardworking people do – I took that feeling and I pushed it deep down to where it can’t be heard. And I did nothing. I chose to die.”

Beach impressed upon the crowd the importance of creating not just an organizational safety culture of policies and procedures, but also a compatible workers’ culture.

The Wood Products Safety Summit is presented by WPAC, along with Canadian Biomass, Canadian Forest Industries and Pulp & Paper Canada magazines. Find the full-length article and photos from this year’s summit at tinyurl.com/yxzdj46t. •