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Blood in the woods
Logging is dangerous work
Maclean's
January 19, 2004
by Ken MacQueen
Sometimes, when things go horribly wrong in the forests of British Columbia, you don't die. Sometimes, mercifully, you don't even feel the pain. It was like that for Roger Harris, who nearly sliced off his right hand when his chainsaw kicked out of a cedar he was falling on the Queen Charlotte Islands. "Thump a finger on the desk," he says. "That's what it felt like." Just a bump, and his hand was hanging off his wrist. His partner collapsed in a dead faint at the sight of it. Harris suspected then that he was about to die, like so many other loggers he has known.
Mel Camilli was a strapping 21-year-old logging old growth on an island off Prince Rupert when his number came up. From the corner of his eye he saw the crane-like grapple yarder — a massive machine used to haul logs on cables out of the forest — swing toward him. A split second before being mashed, he dove over a low pile of logs. "If I clear it I'm fine," he thought, just before the machine crushed his legs. "Honestly," he says, "it didn't hurt." He didn't realize his right leg was severed, held on only by his jeans. Or that his left leg was irreparably damaged. He remembers the pale, stunned faces of the crew, a wild helicopter ride to Prince Rupert, and then little else until waking from a morphine coma in Vancouver — seven weeks and innumerable operations later.
The carnage in B.C.'s forests rips apart bodies, tears up families and cuts deep into the souls of dozens of tiny towns that most Canadians haven't heard of. It's chronic. It's relentless. Death and dismemberment are such constants in B.C. forests that they've become unremarkable. There is no occupation more dangerous. Nothing in a province of high-risk industries comes close. Not farming, mining or oil and gas extraction. Not fishing, firefighting or policing.
And yet most people, secure in their wooden houses in the clear-cuts of urban B.C., pay no notice. Vast forests of pulp are committed to stories and news releases on spirit bears or tree-sitting environmentalists. Dead loggers rate just a paragraph or two in the urban dailies. But they do notice in resource-dependent communities like Terrace, Burns Lake or Masset, says Harris, who got out of the business alive and is now the Liberal MLA for the northern coastal riding of Skeena. He's attended too many logging funerals, where the churches overflow with people and pain. "It's actually one guy dead, 1,200 people injured," he says. "And it's repeated over and over and over again."
Finally, this past August, the B.C. government announced the creation of a Forestry Safety Task Force with the ambitious initial aim to halve death and serious injury rates within three years. "While forestry is a high-risk industry, the rate of death and serious injury is much higher in B.C. than in other parts of the country, and higher than similar dangerous occupations," says Labour Minister Graham Bruce, whose southern Vancouver Island riding is heavily dependent on forestry.
The industry employs 90,000 people in B.C., of whom 28,000 work in the woods. Of these, 250 were killed between 1993 and 2002 and 918 more were severely hurt. The serious injury rate in forestry is about six times that of all other B.C. industries combined. The death rate is 10 times higher.
Last summer in B.C., deaths included a faller crushed by a tree, a veteran millwright pinned by equipment, a young tree planter killed in a truck rollover, and an 18-year-old woman pulled into a belt at a sawmill. Ron Corbeil, national health and safety director for the Burnaby-based Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada (IWA), compiles the deaths and the worst of the injuries he learns about in the union's monthly SafeTalk newsletter. He's frustrated by the lack of public attention. "We're almost expendable," he says. "Police and fire departments unfortunately have deaths, too, though nowhere near as many as us. But when they happen, it seems the whole world comes to a stop."
Corbeil is among three IWA representatives on the task force, which is chaired by Doug Enns, the no-nonsense chairman of the Workers' Compensation Board of B.C. Members include the CEOs of several of the province's largest forestry companies, as well as other worker and industry representatives. Even an acrimonious strike that started on Nov. 21 among the IWA's coastal loggers didn't derail the task force, which is to submit its report to the government early this year. Enns is determined that this report, unlike the many that preceded it, will change the culture of the sector. The lack of public notice of forestry deaths, says Enns, is indicative of a certain fatalism that infects the industry itself. "There's some level of expectation that these things are going to happen. What we need to do is change that expectation."
The group has drawn on a recent IWA safety study that enumerates many contributing factors to workplace dangers. Among them: resistance by all parties to making fundamental changes, a disparity of resources between giant forestry companies and the hundreds of small contractors that account for a disproportionate share of accidents, extremes of climate and terrain, and a stressed and aging workforce — a result of layoffs and contractions in the financially troubled sector. Adding to the risk, the IWA says, are "environmental pressures." Loggers work in smaller cut blocks, selectively fall trees in dense, tangled forest, and follow myriad regulations that many workers say seem to trump safety or common sense. "Environmental considerations often make the safe carrying out of the work extremely difficult when the changes have developed faster than both the training and working culture could progress to meet the legislation," the IWA report says.
Dale Lore, a logging-road builder on the Charlottes, says forestry workers are so demonized by environmentalists that little attention is paid to their concerns or their accidents. "Ever since we resource harvesters became the rapers and looters instead of the providers, I don't think anybody cares," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if, deep down, some in the preservationist movement think, 'One less [logger] to go.' "
That feeling of isolation only perpetuates what has always existed deep in the bush: a sense that loggers must look out for themselves. Compensation board investigators seeking to determine the cause of an accident often encounter a wall of silence among co-workers, as impenetrable as old growth. Roberta Ellis, the board's vice-president of prevention division, says, "I've heard this so many times: 'The guy is dead, just let him rest.' "
Loggers concede such reticence is born of many things. "They resent anybody wanting to talk to them about it," says Lore, who recalls a time as recent as the 1970s when some fatalities weren't even hauled out of the bush until the end of a shift. "Particularly for fallers, if you let fear get to you, you'd better go look for another job," he says. "To go over it too many times, I don't think they want to deal with that fear." Former faller Dean Bergstrom of Queen Charlotte City says investigations are more about finding fault than prevention. Flaws in company procedures or productivity pressures rarely find their way into such reports, he says. "In every goddamn accident investigation I saw, they screwed it around to be faller error."
Bergstrom left the industry six years ago, when he turned 40. He'd pushed his luck as far as he dared, and had witnessed so many near misses he could no longer describe his workday to his wife. He realized he knew only three fallers who'd reached retirement without death or debilitating injury. "You become desensitized to it," he says. "When one of your buddies gets whacked, all the other fallers just look at each other and go, 'I don't know when it's my time, but soon, probably.' It's a bad way of thinking."
There are any number of ways to die. Maybe a tree is frozen on one side, or rotten, and it falls the wrong way. Maybe it "barber-chairs," splitting up the middle and plowing back into the faller. Maybe you cut one tree only to be hit by a "widow-maker," a branch or treetop that crashes from the tangled forest canopy. Or a chainsaw, revving at 14,000 rpm, kicks back, cutting the user or literally helicoptering through the air. People fall. Machines flip. Logs roll. Cables snap. Logging trucks crash.
Enns and Ellis credit WCB and industry safety programs, courses and certification requirements for a significant drop in the overall injury rate in recent years. Still, they're at a loss to explain why the rates of death and serious injury have, in fact, climbed. The reason for that apparent contradiction is simple, says the IWA. Many injuries go unreported, the union says, because some firms are known to punish workers who report minor claims that boost a company's compensation costs. That mistrust is another challenge for the task force to address. Says Enns: "We need equal responsibility for safety throughout the entire chain of command."
With risk once came reward, before the softwood lumber crisis resulted in serial layoffs and diminished pay packets. The unanswerable question now is why people still go into the woods. Bergstrom happily leads a safer life. He's opened a Rolfing practice, realigning posture and bone structure with soft-tissue manipulation. The tales of his falling buddies' near misses leave him as anxious as his wife once felt. "I don't want to be hearing about this," he says, "because I'm going to be going to your guys' funerals. It's just a matter of time." But ask Bergstrom the appeal of falling trees — the most dangerous job of the deadliest industry in B.C. — and he's almost puzzled by the question. "Actually, that's it," he says of the danger. "Fallers have the most prestige."
Harris, who left falling for business and politics, has only partial use of his right hand and an arthritic left leg, courtesy of a tree that barber-chaired and crushed his knee. And yet, "I enjoyed the independence," he says with a trace of nostalgia. "There's an adrenalin rush in that job that keeps your senses keen and sharp."
Six months after his injury, Mel Camilli made the hardest decision of his young life. His remaining leg was fused and useless. For weeks he mourned the inevitable. "I'd lay in bed every night just watching the toes of my left foot wiggle," he says. "I knew I wasn't going to see them again." The doctors amputated at the hip. "I'm three-foot-two," he says. "It actually says that on my driver's licence." Today, at 38, he's married with two young children, plays wheelchair sports, and works for the compensation board, dividing his time between computer programming and safety talks at schools and work sites. "To this day I miss the smell of fresh-cut wood," he says. "It gets inside you."
When the task force report is released, it is expected to contain a brave assertion that the forestry industry of the future "will be one where no one gets seriously injured and where no one gets killed." It's a "noble effort," says Harris, whose own Liberals initiated the study. "I don't want to be a fatalist, because it sounds wrong," he says. "But this is an inherently dangerous occupation."
Perhaps, says Camilli, the report can generate the kind of outrage that would result if such carnage bloodied the offices of downtown Vancouver. Society as a whole must say this pain is unacceptable, he says. "Until we make it a big deal for everyone, it's not going to be a big deal for anyone."