According to a new research study in Scotland, fully 36% of workplace injuries can be tied to slips, trips and falls, making these types of injuries by far the most common kind of work accident claims.

The good news is that such accidents are commonly caused by circumstances such as untidy work spaces, spillages on floors, uneven floors, obstructions, bad lighting and other things that are relatively easy to fix. Therefore, if regular workplace inspections occur, employers could potentially find these problems and effectively prevent future accidents, thus saving everyone a lot of money.

Workplace accidents caused an estimated 4.7 million sick days in Scotland alone last year, and most of them began as slips, trips and falls and not serious injuries, but resulted in employees seeking workers compensation for bad injuries that could been avoided.

Construction sites are among the workplaces most susceptible to slips, trips and falls. Part of the problem is that building sites naturally provide a number of risks and safety hazards to employees not associated with other professions.

The Ontario government recently launched an eight-week health and safety awareness campaign designed to enlighten construction workers and their employers.

They unveiled the campaign at Algonquin College, at the site of the school’s  new construction trades building, which will open to about 2,500 construction trades students next year. The new campaign follows a 90-day safety enforcement blitz of more than 2,800 construction sites.

Even though the province’s lost-time injury rate among construction workers is one of the lowest in Canada, the 90-day blitz revealed numerous violations, including improper equipment use and poor supervisor and worker training. As a result, Ontario officials decided that it was time to emphasize the need for the entire construction industry to learn the importance of safety.

The campaign is being run in Canadian cities with the highest construction activity, including Ottawa.  It is sponsored by the Ministry of Labour, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and the Infrastructure Health & Safety Coalition, and will feature newspaper advertising in the key ethnic languages spoken in the construction sector, and posters will appear on construction fences.  Tip sheets for workers will be available on the ministry’s website at www.ontario.ca/ConstructionSafety.

Another aspect of the campaign revolves around a hope that the public can become more involved in providing information to ministry officials. To that end, a toll free phone number (1-877-202-0008) has been established for the public to call in and report safety issues they see. If a follow-up visit deems a jobsite unsafe, the province can issue a stop-work order in the interests of safety.

A Calgary construction worker who became a YouTube sensation when he made a joke out of high rise construction safety has been terminated by his employer.

Last week, the president and CEO of Skyway Canada, Gary Carey, confirmed that, after an internal investigation of the incident, one employee was fired.

The video, which was posted on YouTube in October 2009, shows a number of construction workers as they worked from scaffolding on the 29th storey of a condo development under construction. One worker could be seen tossing a metal clamp and passing a co-worker a metal rod. The worker who tossed the tool was fired for violating company policies. Another worker was suspended, but allowed to return to work after the investigation, after it was determined that he wasn’t involved in the prank, and had actually voiced his objections to the other workers. A third worker involved in the video is no longer with the company.

When the video was discovered online, it was passed to company and government officials, all of whom saw the behaviour as offensive, especially since it came approximately two months after the tragic death of three-year-old Michelle Krsek, who was killed by metal roofing material that fell from a downtown Calgary high rise construction site.

Skyway still has to submit a report to Occupational Health and Safety officials.

MMFX Steel of Canada Inc. has been fined $120,000 for a violation under the Occupational Health and Safety Act that caused a worker’s death.

The accident occurred on January 20, 2009 at the company’s Welland steel mill and foundry, when a worker was walking across the workplace’s yard. The worker crossed the path of a moving front-end loader, and he fell under the vehicle’s wheel. The loader operator did not see the fallen worker, who was run over and killed by the loader.

The company pleaded guilty to violations of Regulation 851/90, Section 20, failing to install signs, barriers or other safeguards in an area where vehicle or pedestrian traffic may endanger the safety of a worker.

The fine was imposed by Justice of the Peace Bruce Phillips. In addition to the fine, the court imposed a 25% victim fine surcharge, as required by the Provincial Offences Act, an amount that is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.  That makes the total cost to MMFX Steel of Canada Inc.

In the wake of the tragic scaffolding accident that occurred last Christmas Eve  in which four foreign workers plummeted to their deaths, two Ontario companies now face the prospect of paying $17 million in fines for violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA), as well as at least $30 million in lawsuits.

Last December  24, five workers were working from a scaffold on the side of aToronto high-rise, when the scaffolding broke apart, causing the workers to fall 13 storeys to the ground, killing four of them, and leaving the one worker who survived with a broken spine and two broken legs.

After a seven-month investigation, the Ontario Ministry of Labour has announced that it would lay 30 charges against the workers’ employer, Metron Construction, four charges against Swing ‘N’ Scaff, the scaffolding supplier, 19 charges against the directors of each company and eight charges against a supervisor. Among the charges against the companies were; failure to ensure workers used devices to prevent them from falling, failure to ensure the platform wasn’t overloaded, failure to ensure the platform was designed according to safety regulations and failure to ensure the workers were properly trained. The charges against the individuals include improper training of employees.

The companies face possible fines of up to $500,000 for each of the charges, while the individuals potentially face a fine up to $25,000, and up to a year in jail for each charge. In addition to facing the potential fines, 22-year-old Dilshod Marupov, the worker who survived, has also filed a lawsuit against the companies, the building owner and the Ministry of Labour, seeking $16.3 million in damages. The lawsuit claims the workers weren’t trained properly or given safety gear, and alleges the scaffolding was faulty. The ministry is included because the suit claims it allowed the companies to continue operating at the worksite despite two previous stop work orders for safety violations. Marupov’s lawyer has also filed a $14 million lawsuit on behalf of the estate of one of the workers killed.

In addition to the civil fines under OHSA, the employers could also face serious fines and prison sentences based on a criminal investigation under the Criminal Code of Canada. Bill C-45, passed in 2004, expanded the criminal liability of organizations for workplace accidents and broadened the range of individuals who are subject to criminal charges. While there have been previous cases in which Ontario employers in have served jail time as a result of workplace accidents, the Criminal Code has rarely been used since Bill C-45 was passed.

According to the Ontario Federation of Labour, the number of Canadian workers killed on the job has risen over the past 15 years. Altogether, 479 work-related fatalities in Ontario were reported to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board in 2009.

Edmonton-based equipment dealer Finning Canada faces four counts for violations of Alberta’s occupational health and safety code in the wake of a worker’s death two years ago.

On July 8, 2008, a worker was killed on the job at Suncor Energy Inc’s Millennium mine site near Fort McMurray, when he and other Finning workers were moving a disabled hauling truck to the shop for repairs. The worker was run over by the vehicle and fatally injured, and two other workers also sustained minor injuries in the accident. One was treated on-site, while the other was taken to hospital in Grande Prairie, where he was treated and released.  A stop-work order was issued at the time, restricted to the immediate area around the site of the accident.

Finning released a statement on its website calling the worker’s death “truly a tragic incident – one that will forever impact Kevin’s family, all those who worked alongside him in the oil sands and our company as a whole.” The statement goes on to say that “at Finning, safety is a core value that influences everything we do. We remain committed to achieving and sustaining health and safety excellence in all of our business operations.”

The charges the company faces include;

• Failing as an employer to ensure, as far as it is reasonably practicable to do so, the health and safety of workers engaged in the work of that employer, as stipulated under section 2(1)(a)(i) of the provincial Occupational Health & Safety Act;
• Violation of sections 7(4) and 8(1) of the Act. Section 7(4) states that an employer must ensure that a hazard assessment is repeated at reasonably practicable intervals to prevent the development of unsafe and unhealthy working conditions.  Section 8(1) stipulates that an employer must involve affected workers in the hazard assessment and in the control or elimination of the hazards identified.
• Violation of section 15(1) of the Act, which demands that an employer must ensure that a worker is trained in the safe operation of the equipment the worker is required to operate.

The company is scheduled to first appear in Fort McMurray Provincial Court August 30 .

A Toronto researcher is looking at ways to reduce the number of falls on ice, by trying to develop what she refers to as “winter tires for feet.”

Jennifer Hsu, (her name is pronounced “shoe” — no lie), a PhD candidate in biomedical and mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, has spent a large portion of her summer inside of a cold lab at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute,  trying to find out more about why and how people fall during the winter months, in the hope that she might design shoes that could ultimately help to  prevent falls.

Hsu has been concentrating on falls by postal workers in the past, because they work outside in all conditions and often lose work time because of injuries suffered through falls on ice. More specifically, she’s looking at the cleats Canada Post provides for mail carriers.

Coat wearing volunteers in the climate-controlled lab,  which is typically set to temperatures as low as –20°C, traipse over walkways  designed to imitate surfaces such as steep ramps and stairs, while sensors record their movements. Each volunteer is equipped with a safety harness to prevent them from being injured.

In addition to researching the materials and design of the shoes, Hsu is also examining how people walk while wearing different types of footwear.

Past research has shown that most falls occur at a temperature of about 0°C outside, when a thin layer of water ices over, or after a thick layer of snow falls on top of ice . It is estimated the injuries due to falls cost the Canadian health care system about $2.8 billion a year.

Hsu’s research is being conducted with the help of an Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board grant.

Who could ever have imagined that breaking wind could make the roads safer and the air cleaner?  That’s certainly the hope of the Ontario provincial government.

It is a fact that one of the great difficulties with clearing highways during winter is having to deal with blowing and drifting snow. It’s not unusual for snowplow operators to clear a section of road, only to have to do so again because of snow that has drifted from a nearby field.

To combat this problem, Ontario has developed a special project in the West region to build partnerships with farming agencies and groups to encourage the planting of farm windbreaks, which are lines of trees designed to block drifting snow from blowing onto the highway. But it is also hoped that the project, which is supported in part by the Ontario Public Service Innovation Fund, will also provide environmental benefits.

The effects of blowing and drifting snow accounts for as much as 30% of plowing, salting and sanding costs,  which comes to about $3,000 per two-lane kilometre per year. Combined with the province’s purchase of state-of-the-art, efficient snow removal equipment and technology, it is hoped that the planting of farm windbreaks will result in significant cost savings.

But the benefit is not just about winter highway maintenance. While last winter saw major reductions in snow removal costs in areas where windbreaks already existed, area farmers who plant windbreaks see crop yields increase by 5-25% on average. The windbreaks reduce soil erosion, provide wildlife habitat, improve air quality, and have a cooling effect on climate.

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To help raise awareness, provincial environmental officials launched an advertisement campaign last year designed to attract the attention of farmers, including a brochure featuring the slogan “Break Wind, Make Money” that is currently being distributed at farm shows, grower meetings, conferences and workshops throughout Ontario. .

The Farm Windbreaks project is intended to promote sustainability, reducing the effects of climate change and to reduce the environmental contamination by road chemicals, as well as improve road and transportation safety.

So go ahead, break wind, and keep the roads clear.

Based on a new report, British scientists have apparently found that what a person does for a living could play a role in how they die. The study found major differences between occupational groups and their risk of death from drug and alcohol-related diseases

The scientists analyzed all deaths among men and women aged 16-74 years in England and Wales between 1991 and 2000 – a total of more than 1.6 million deaths overall — and found some disturbing trends, based on a person’s chosen profession.

For example, their study found that merchant seamen had a high risk for death from cirrhosis and other alcohol-related illnesses such as cancer of the liver and mouth, as well as expected causes, such as from accidents like falling down stairs.

They also found that painters, bricklayers and roofers were twice as likely to die as a result of drug abuse, based on the statistical average. Accidental drug overdoses and poisoning was nearly twice the average among male painters, decorators, bricklayers, plasterers and roofers, and they found that cooks and bartenders were far more likely to suffer an alcohol-related death than the population as a whole.

Male tailors and dressmakers and make hairdressers were found to have a risk of death from HIV/AIDS that was nearly nine times higher than the statistical average.

The authors of the study hope to use this information to encourage employers to promote the implementation of general health information into their existing health and safety training programs.

Saskatchewan roofing companies may face serious fines if they fail to implement safety procedures as provincial authorities continue a major crackdown on this growing industry.

Since April, eight roofing companies in the province have been fined for violating safety standards. Most of the fines are related to workers not wearing proper harnesses while on the job.

Saskatchewan Occupational Health and Safety has stepped up enforcement in the hopes that increased fines and scrutiny will serve as a warning to companies, and make them aware that they will be punished if they don’t make workers wear fall protection.

While most support the increase in enforcement, some actually side with the companies, who often feel challenged by keeping workers trained and certified, given the industry’s high employee turnover.  Occupational Health and Safety officials, however, note that a lack of resources is never a good excuse for lax safety.

Provincial officials would also like to make homeowners aware that, when using smaller roofing companies, they should check to be sure they’re covered through Workers Compensation. If a company is not carrying the proper insurance coveraged, the homeowner might be liable for any injury sustained by the worker.

Occupational Health and Safety intends to continue, and even step up inspections until all roofing companies comply with the rules.