Miners deaths a ‘wake-up’ call for all jurisdictions
This year marks 20 years since the Westray mine explosion, a occupational health and safety disaster that killed 26 miners in Plymouth, N.S.
Maureen Shaw, a safety consultant and president of Act Three Consulting in British Columbia, can recall exactly what she was doing when she heard about the explosion.
She was preparing to speak at an international safety conference in Australia when the news came on the television. At the time, she was the chair of the board of governors at the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. She remembers returning to her Hamilton apartment and seeing mothers of the victims waiting outside the mine on Mother’s Day, the day after the explosion.
“I have forever burnt in my mind this picture of the women standing outside the mine waiting to see if their sons were going to be pulled out or not. It was very poignant,” said Shaw.
When Shaw got to Australia, she says people on the other side of world already knew about the tragedy.
“They had been holding Canada as an example. They couldn’t understand how something as catastrophic as the explosion could happen,” she said.
She’s not the only one that remembers the explosion’s international reach. Leo McKay wrote a novel about the incident called Twenty-Six. He vividly remembers waking up in Japan, where he was working at the time, and hearing about the disaster on the radio.
“I heard the name of my hometown on the radio in Japan: Stellarton, Nova Scotia,” he said.
“I think that the Westray explosion taught this province some hard lessons,” said McKay, who is living in Truro, N.S., now.
There have been many changes in the occupational health and safety field in Nova Scotia since the mine exploded in 1992.
“It was basically, I think, a wake-up call for all jurisdictions that workplace safety need to be addressed in a more robust way,” said Greg Green, director of investigations, technical and internal services at the Nova Scotia department of Labour and Advanced Education.
The Westray Inquiry was called about six days after the disaster. The inquiry took about five years and resulted in 74 recommendations specific to the mining industry. The report that came out as a result was called The Westray Story: A predictable path to disaster.
“It highlighted the fact that there were many things that could have been prevented that weren’t done,” said Green.
The government underwent an internal review post-Westray to make sure staff were well trained. It established a more rigorous training program for new inspector hires. It required them to undergo the occupational safety training people would take in the workplaces they would be inspecting, such as welding safety or fall protection, said Green.
The disaster has impacted health and safety not just in Nova Scotia, but across the country, said Shaw.
“(It) put health and safety more on the public agenda, it did a lot to question the trust of leadership, which I think leadership is still having to deal with,” said Shaw.
In the last 20 years the whole area of health and safety has undergone a shift to looking at organizations holistically instead of as parts, she said.
Not only has the focus shifted, but the area has also expanded to look more at the people who are coming to work and ensure they are healthy, she said.
“We would never have talked about wellness 20 years ago... now we’re concerned, we want people to look after their personal wellness,” she said.
As an observer of health and safety in the public eye, McKay said he’s noticed a big difference in mainstream media coverage of health and safety since Westray.
“When the Westray explosion took place, I think many people in the media in the province realized, ‘Uh-oh we should have been on top of this story,’” he said. “I think issues of workplace safety are taken much more seriously in this province than they were before Westray.”
Workplace incidents get more air time in Nova Scotia than other Canadian cities he has lived in, said McKay.
“Workplace safety stories get reported on in the media here, period. Other places in the country that doesn’t happen,” he said
Nova Scotia is currently undergoing a review and consolidation of its health and safety regulations. This will take all of its stand-alone regulations and put them together in one document, said Green.
“So they’ll be much easier for the end user to be able to navigate and know the regulations that apply to them,” he said.
Even with all the changes that have come in the last 20 years, it’s still important to remain diligent with health and safety programs in the workplace, said Shaw.
“There’s always a risk that it could happen today,” she said. “Particularly when we hit times of economic fragility it just takes taking your eye off the ball. It may not necessarily be in mining because we aren’t doing as much in mining, but it still could happen in other industries.”
It may seem like safety professionals are protecting their own turf when they emphasize keeping programs robust during difficult economic times, but that’s not it, said Shaw.
“One would hope it wouldn’t happen, but companies have to be forever vigilant.”
