The Ontario courts were busy last week, and in the space of four days, worker accidents cost three companies a lot of money.  Take a look at the details of each accident; every one of them was easily preventable with just some basic safety training and worker awareness.

1. In one case, elevator and escalator manufacturer Kone Inc. was fined $90,000 for a violation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act that caused a worker to be injured.

The fine was for an incident that occurred on September 11, 2008, when a worker was repairing an elevator circuit board at the University of Western Ontario. The worker stood on a ladder in the pit and shaft area of the elevator while the elevator’s power was still on. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the worker wasn’t using rubber gloves, mats, shields, or other equipment to protect against electrical shock. Of course, when the worker touched the back of the circuit board, the resultant electric shock caused him to fall to the concrete floor of the pit, resulting in wrist and facial fractures.

Kone Inc. pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the worker used rubber gloves, mats, shields and other protective equipment and procedures adequate to ensure protection from electrical shock and burns.

2.  In another case, a $60,000 fine was imposed on Tri City Materials Ltd., a company that works with aggregates, after it, too, pleaded guilty for a violation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act that caused an injury to a worker.

The incident that led to this fine occurred on December 30, 2008. A worker was cleaning out a trailer that acted as a hopper for various materials. Because the hopper’s chute needed power to stay open, the truck attached to the trailer was left running.  Unfortunately, when another worker shut off the truck during the cleaning process, the chute gate immediately closed and caught the worker’s leg.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found that the company’s procedure for safely cleaning the trailer required that it be locked out with its chute gate manually wedged open. They determined that the worker was improperly trained, and was unfamiliar with this procedure or the hazards associated with cleaning out the trailer.

Tri City Materials Ltd. pleaded guilty to failing to acquaint the worker with the hazards associated with cleaning out the trailer.

3. Within days of the above fines, Abitibi Consolidated Company of Canada, owner and operator of a paper mill in Fort Frances, was slapped with a $125,000 fine for their violation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act for an accident that injured two workers and a student.

That incident occurred on August 20, 2008, when two of the paper mill’s electricians were changing the power box for part of a paper machine. In this case, the power to the box itself was locked out, but the power to the cabinet containing the box was not shut off or locked out. As the electricians removed the power box, they noticed a cable inside the cabinet that needed to be moved, so one of them reached into the cabinet with a metal tool to remove a clamp holding the cable in place. In doing so, the tool made electrical contact with a live conductor inside the cabinet, creating an arc flash, which in turn caused another arc flash from the live conductors overhead.

The accident caused both electricians to suffer first, second and third degree burns. At the same time, a student who was standing nearby and watching them suffered first degree burns.

Abitibi Consolidated Company of Canada pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that a tool was not used near a live electrical installation to prevent electrical contact with a live conductor.

In addition to the $275,000 in fines in the three cases above, the court also imposed a 25% victim fine surcharge, as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime. That puts the total cost to these three companies at more than $343,000, all for accidents that could have been prevented with a little health and safety awareness.

Proper health and safety training doesn’t cost. It pays.

The mayor of Windsor, Ontario, Eddie Francis, declared a state of emergency July 8 after a parking garage collapsed at about 10:40 a.m., crushing numerous cars and sending one person to hospital. The state of emergency allowed the city access to provincial emergency response teams to delve into the wreckage to help search for any victims.

According to witnesses, the only man injured was the operator of a boom truck near a building entrance. He was using the boom truck to prepare for the commencement of building maintenance work when the pavement under his truck gave way. The collapse caused the operator to be thrown from his cab, and he was hanging by his safety belt when rescue workers arrived at the scene. They quickly used a pulley system to lift him to safety, fitted him with a neck brace and transported him to hospital.

Search dogs and a camera-equipped robot combed through the rubble of the underground structure to look for victims. Thankfully, the dogs found no one in the lower levels.

The aftermath of the collapse was a remarkable sight, according to witnesses. Several vehicles that had been parked on the ground level were leaning into the hole, while others sat precariously on yellow steel pillars. As time passed, the hole slowly grew bigger and the cars slid farther in.

A nearby apartment building was evacuated as a precaution, with tenants put up in nearby hotels until the building could be declared safe.

Municipal officials refused to speculate on the cause of the accident, but noted that the parking lot had a lot of cars, and that the likely cause was that the structure wasn’t capable of handling the load. The boom truck weighs about 10,000 kilograms.

If you do business in Alberta and you have a poor safety record, you’d do well to take steps to improve it, and do so quickly. It seems your days of hiding from it may be numbered.

After a bloody Tuesday last week in which two Edmonton-area workers died at work sites and another was seriously injured in an elevator accident, Alberta Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk was livid, and took to the airwaves to vow that this fall would see the public release of the identities of those provincial employers with the worst safety records.

In a radio interview in which he was asked about those recent deaths, Lukaszuk revealed that Albertans will learn the names of the province’s worst safety performers within 3-4 months. The Conservative government had first promised to release such list eight years ago, but at that time the idea was shelved.

Lukaszuk said his staff is working on the list with the help of the Workers Compensation Board (WCB). When the list is complete, anyone will be able to look up the name of a company and see the number of man-work hours they have, see how many accidents they had, and determine how they compare to industry and provincial averages.

If Alberta actually follows through with its promise and releases such a list of poor safety performers, it will become just the second province to do so. Nova Scotia began publishing the names of companies with substandard safety record after their Supreme Court ruled in favour of their release in December 2008.

This type of list could have a negative effect in two ways. The obvious impact will be with prospective employees. How many of the best workers will want to come work for you if you have a lousy safety record? And how many of your customers will take their business to another company that takes the safety of its workers more seriously?

This might be a good time to look at your safety record and look at ways to improve. The impact to your bottom line could be enormous.

The numbers tell the story.

According to a Workers Compensation Board (WCB) report published in 1999, a total of 1,482 work related deaths were reported over a 10 year period. Of those, 519, or 35%, were the result of industrial vehicle accidents. Just as troubling was the WCB calculation that for every work fatality, there were 29 injuries. Statistics also show that every fatality costs an insurance company from $2 to $5 million. Since every extra dollar spent by an insurance company gets passed on as part of a client company’s premiums, fewer fatalities saves everyone money.

It was statistics like those above that motivated Pro-active Safety Systems Technology Inc. (PSST) to develop a truly revolutionary heavy equipment safety system to reverse the numbers and make workers safer.

In 2006, industrial electricians Rick Shervey and John DaSilva heard about a couple of accidents at nearby companies involving loaders within the space of a month, and realized just how ineffective the warning systems were. So, they set about to build a new warning system that would properly alert people when they were in the path of a moving piece of equipment and stop it in the event of an imminent disaster.

The idea they came up with is a system in which every piece of equipment is fitted with a detector, and every worker wears a vest with a RFID (radio frequency identification) tag embedded or attached.  An antenna broadcasts at a 30º angle to the front and back of the machine, and as it moves around, it senses every worker within the critical area, and sends a signal to the unit on the vest. If a worker enters the zone, the machine activates a two-stage warning light system and actually activates the brake.  The range is accurate from 70 cm to 400 m, but the company has targeted the zero to five-meter range as the critical zone for preventing accidents.

This potential benefits from this type of safety system are so great that the National Research Council Canada has provided the company with research-specific grants; and the WorkSafeBC Research Secretariat has provided two Innovation at Work grants; $46,000 in 2007 and $100,000 in 2008. Not only that, but this past January, the device received the Northern British Columbia Business and Technology’s Workplace Health and Safety Award.

And the product has thus far only been used in 22 test cases thus far. The company is preparing to make its first production units available by January 2011. You can read more about this at the PSST website.

Regulators with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission have asked Ontario power plant operator Bruce Power to test almost of its workers for exposure to cancer-causing alpha radiation, but the company has decided that the process of getting the fecal samples needed to conduct the testing is just too difficult and time consuming, and it has counter-proposed to survey 38 people first, in order to confirm that further testing is warranted.

Contamination was discovered in the reactor vault last November, where more than 550 employees had been working. After conducting its own investigation, the company concluded that 195 of its workers had been exposed and ordered testing. Those tests found that radiation levels did not exceed the safety standards prescribed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

The commission issued the request last week and followed up with a letter to senior officials at the country’s three other nuclear plant operators, including Ontario Power Generation, NB Power, and Hydro-Québec, demanding that they investigate their plants for possible alpha radiation hazards and implement controls to mitigate potential worker exposures. The call for mass testing at the power plants indicates serious concern about potential radiation hazards within the power stations.

While it is unusual for a nuclear operator to negotiate a formal, written request for action from the CNSC, it seems to be within the law. Under the applicable sections of the government’s General Nuclear Safety and Control Regulations, federal inspectors issue requests to nuclear companies, not binding orders.

Is your workplace prepared for every possible emergency? Hopefully, you have policies, procedures and equipment in place to keep your workers safe from accidents and workplace violence. But what if a worker simply turns blue and collapses from a heart attack? Surely, you have at least a few workers who know CPR, but what if the CPR isn’t enough? Wouldn’t it be great if other employees were able to grab an automated external defibrillator (AED) and could revive that worker within minutes?

An AED is a small, portable device that assesses the heart of a person in cardiac arrest for a “shockable” rhythm. If such a rhythm is detected, a button is pressed to deliver a shock or series of shocks to the victim’s heart, which then allow the heart to return to a normal rhythm.

Several companies are making a push to see to it that such machines are available  everywhere, but at this point, AEDs are still relatively rare in workplaces throughout Canada, in part because Canada doesn’t mandate their use.

According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, more than 40,000 people suffer  cardiac arrests in Canada each year. Fewer than 5% of those who suffer an attack outside a hospital survive — and roughly 70% of cardiac arrests occur outside a hospital. Their studies have shown that workplaces with 2,000 employees and an average age of 40 can expect at least one cardiac arrest incident every year.

Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) has reported that there have been 200 claims for workplace heart attacks over the last three years. Since not all heart attacks that occur in the workplace are job related, the WSIB considers each case on its own merits.

According to studies, keeping an AED onsite can increase the chance of survival from heart attack by 75% or more over CPR on its own. Defibrillation is more successful if performed within five minutes of cardiac arrest and survival chances decrease 10% for every minute that passes after the arrest.

Those who think the devices are just too expensive should know that prices have dropped dramatically in recent years, with units priced well under $2,000 now. Most units can be installed without professional assistance. AEDs are battery powered and the batteries are not rechargeable, so they don’t require a power supply.  For maintenance, they only require daily spot checks to ensure the status indicator light is on, and monthly checks to make sure the unit is in good working order. Batteries, which currently cost about $200-300, last 3-5 years. The pads, which currently run between $70-100 per pair, only have to be replaced when used.

It is necessary to train employees on how to use AEDs, but the training is not difficult or intensive. The Heart and Stroke Foundation suggests that anyone with a Grade 6 education can learn to use an AED in 20 minutes. In order to reduce liability risks, the Heart and Stroke Foundation recommends companies ensure operators have medical oversight, ensure certain members of staff are properly trained and that protocols for continued training, operation and equipment maintenance are in place. The Heart and Stroke Foundation recommends that all employees, if possible, have the skills necessary to perform CPR and the use of an AED.

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) has created a new guide designed to introduce Canadians to the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS), to help prepare workplaces for anticipated changes, as the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) looks forward to adopting the GHS standards.

The purpose of GHS is create a universal set of rules for classifying hazards and the same format and content for labels and safety data sheets (SDS) to be adopted and used around the world. The new guide, entitled “WHMIS After GHS: Preparing for Change” will help organizations negotiate the anticipated changes, understand the new requirements and facilitate a successful transition to the global standard.

While the exact details of the changes won’t be known until the legislation is published in the Canada Gazette II, there is sufficient information available to encourage workplaces to begin preparation. The guide will:

• Provide an overview of the new Globally Harmonized System (GHS)
• Describe the changes to WHMIS that should be expected when GHS rules for classification, labelling, symbols/pictograms, and safety data sheets (SDSs) are adopted.
• Provide advice on steps that employers can take in order to transition successfully to WHMIS After adoption of GHS

A copy of  WHMIS After GHS: Preparing for Change can be purchased by clicking on the title.

Vancouver officials are investigating a building demolition in which two walls and a lamp collapsed onto the street, barely missing a flagperson and several cars.

Unfortunately, the incident, which occurred at 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon during a demolition being conducted by Global Excavation and Demolition, was caught on video, and several of the videos have gone viral on YouTube, raising questions about the company’s safety procedures.  The company, however, claims the situation was “under control” and suggested that in any demolition, “sometimes things happen that are out of your control.” Karmjeet Singh Panesar, one of the owners of Global Excavation and Demolition,  was apparently operating the crane at the time.

One video (see below), taken from a high angle, shows one wall of 1102 Hornby St. collapsing onto Helmcken Street.  Seemingly undeterred, the operator continued to work, and proceeded to follow that up by knocking down an adjacent wall, part of which fell onto Hornby Street and took out a lamp post.

This is not their first incident. The company has received six compliance orders in the last three years, including one for an excavation. They currently have one other demolition permit for Vancouver, but that has been put on hold while city officials and WorkSafeBC review the company’s safety practices.  The YouTube videos will be used as evidence in the investigation.

The company has promised to pay for replacement of the $4,000 lamp post.

Here is the video of the first collapse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKIZk4qAqKU

And here is the video of the second:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvWRKojULbo

In yet another accident demonstrating the danger of working near overhead power lines, workers at a construction site in Dieppe, New Brunswick had a close call when their dump truck struck some lines. Thankfully, this time no one was hurt.

The accident occurred as two dump trucks were being used as part of a road construction project. The operator of one dump truck situated his truck underneath the power line, and when a hydro line lifted the box of his vehicle, it contacted and snapped the line, and the snapped line  landed on a smaller dump truck, which caught fire.

WorkSafeNB is conducting an investigation into the incident to determine if there were any infractions under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. The workers were employees of Cherryfield Contracting Ltd, which was contracted by the City of Dieppe for the construction work.

Despite the fact that there were no injuries, every precaution was taken to put out the fire, so that all workers remained safe. In fact, firefighters refused to put out the fire for about an hour because the power line was still live.

This incident happened less than two weeks after an employee of Ken Miller Excavating in Brockville, Ontario was electrocuted when his boom truck struck the power line at a construction site, as he delivered concrete sections for storm sewers.

WorkSafeBC has named a new chair to its board of directors, as George Morfitt has replaced Roslyn Kunin, who has been the organization’s chair for the last two years.

Morfitt is no newcomer to WorkSafeBC. He has been a WorkSafeBC director for nearly four years, and in recent months served as the board’s vice-chair.  An adjunct professor for the University of Victoria, Morfitt also serves as an advisor to the School of Public Administration. Before that, he spent time as auditor general of British Columbia, where he led the implementation of measures to bring greater transparency in governance and accountability, including new auditing guidelines for government ministries, Crown corporations and public agencies, including WorkSafeBC. He also recently served as a councilor for the Health Council of Canada.

The outgoing chair, Kunin, whose term ended in May, was WorkSafeBC’s longest serving board member, with seven years on the board, including the last two as chair.  Her tenure saw a decline in B.C’s injury rate, which reached the lowest level on record, as well as a significant reduction in employer premium rates.

WorkSafeBC is an independent provincial statutory agency governed by a board of directors that serves about 2.3 million workers and more than 200,000 employers.