TALL TIMBER
“If you don’t know how to build and use it, you don’t know how to design it,” says Treescape’s Brandon Whiddett. He certainly walks the talk when it comes to designing and innovating the tools of his trade.
AS WE ALL KNOW, FORESTRY IS AN important industry and driver of New Zealand’s economy, and it’s an industry that does its very best to follow the highest Health & Safety measures. Sadly, it is also an industry with significant risks where work-related injuries and fatalities still happen. Under the HSWA2015, employers have a responsibility to ensure their workplaces are safe and their employees are not working under the influence and are without risk to others.
As a result, workplace drug testing has become important in the safetysensitive forestry industry where employees operate heavy machinery and require their full cognitive abilities. That means a responsible employer regularly enacts random, with reasonable cause, post-incident and pre-employment testing of their workforce.
Good testing helps eliminate drugs like cannabis and methamphetamine being used by workers operating dangerous logging equipment or even just driving between sites, and it ensures companies remain compliant and have the processes to withstand a legal challenge.
According to TDDA’s (The Drug Detection Agency) in-house testing data, cannabis remains the most common drug found in its forestry testing and is also the most common drug found in 69% of all driving-under-the-influenceof-drugs (DUID) cases studied.
Fatally injured drivers under the influence of cannabis were most prevalent in those under 25 years of age. These are the people driving