editorial

WITH FOUR FORESTRY DEATHS ALREADY THIS YEAR AND SERIOUS harm injuries on the rise, is it time to rethink our approach to safety? WorkSafe NZ, the nation’s official safety watchdog, believes it is. Five years on from the horror year of 2013, when ten of our people were killed in the forest, it was hoped that we’d be getting much closer to the zero harm goal that the industry set itself in the wake of those tragedies.

Apart from 2014, when there was a dramatic reduction in both deaths

(just one) and long-term injuries as everyone focused on strategies and actions to keep people safe, we’ve struggled to maintain that downward momentum. In the last 18 months, the trend appears to be heading up.

“Is complacency slipping in,” WorkSafe’s Chief Operating Officer, Phil Parkes, asked the attendees at last month’s Forest Safety & Technology 2018 conference in Rotorua. Or are there deeper issues that need redressing?

That’s something the industry itself is going to need to drill down into when it meets again next month at a mini summit being organised by WorkSafe to try and figure out why we’re not making the sort of progress everyone wants to see.

It’s not my place to second-guess the outcome of this summit, but in the course of my work I do have a few observations that might help shed some light on where the industry needs to focus its attention.

If there is one thing that stands out in all my visits to forestry crews, it’s the emphasis on paperwork – the development of written safety procedures and then making sure all the documentation is correct if and when the safety inspector wants to see it.

That’s all well and good, but it’s not the paperwork that keeps people from being injured, it’s how the crew as a whole and as individuals buy into the RIGHT way to do their job and to make sure their colleagues are doing it RIGHT, too. Note that I didn’t say SAFE, because if you do the job RIGHT, you will be safe. It’s only when you deviate from the RIGHT path that the odds of something going WRONG are increased.

And, yes, there will always be freak accidents that are beyond the control of anyone, but I would argue that most, if not all incidents could be predicted and prevented with the RIGHT preparation and approach. Documenting things on paper is only part of the process.

But it will take more than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s to make it work.

We’ll only get there when we believe it is RIGHT. And we CARE.