Board to appeal fine for $628K

The Vernon school board will appeal a fine of $628,000 levied against the district by WorksafeBC.

Officials with the school board did not take the proper steps to clear a leased downtown property of asbestos, WorkSafeBC says.

“This penalty is the result of a repeat, high-risk violation for exposing workers to asbestos, which is a known carcinogen,” WorksafeBC spokesman Scott McCloy wrote Tuesday in an email.

When school district workers were renovating the property, required precautions to protect them from possible exposure to asbestos were not taken, McCloy says, adding the district also failed to ensure a qualified person inspected the worksite to identify any potentially hazardous materials.

“We’re certainly disappointed and surprised by the amount of this fine,” Vernon school district superintendent Joe Rogers said Tuesday.

“It’s particularly upsetting because we’ve already complied with everything WorkSafe told us to do, and done a lot more beside, at some considerable cost.”

The first step in contesting a fine is to ask WorkSafeBC to review its own decision, Rogers said. That has already been done.

Such a review must be completed within 45 days, Rogers said, and if WorkSafeBC upholds its own decision, the district can then apply to an independent tribunal.

Vernon School District has a contingency fund of $1 million, which is designed to cover unforeseen expenses “like a boiler blowing up,” Rogers said.

The $628,000 fine has already been paid, and the amount will be returned to the school district if the financial penalty is eliminated or reduced.

The district leased a downtown property for its Open Door Learning Centre last May. School district officials say they weren’t told by the property owner that the building contained asbestos.

When asbestos was discovered, the hazardous material was removed. The district also implemented a policy to identify and remove asbestos from all buildings and revamped health and safety regulations.

The size of the fine was calculated by WorkSafeBC using a formula that involves the district’s total payroll and its approximately 650 employees.

Rogers says that’s a particularly unfair approach, because less than a dozen maintenance employees were working at the Open Learning Centre when the asbestos was discovered last year.

WorkSafeBC has already fined the Vernon school district $75,000 for potentially exposing workers to asbestos.

“We knew they were continuing to investigate, but we never thought we’d get hit with another fine this large,” Rogers said.

Long-term exposure to asbestos has been linked to lung cancer and other lung diseases. Asbestos is the No. 1 killer of workers in B.C., WorkSafeBC says, with 584 people dying between 2006 and 2015 from diseases related to asbestos exposure.