More Musings on Forestry Safety from an HR/Careers and HSE Perspective

Forestry Safety, Health and Safety sarah

The last blog I wrote featured forestry safety and the horrendous statistics around fatalities and hospitalised injuries.

A number of replies were along the lines of “Right Bondy, what’s the answer?’ In short, there is no magic bullet and I need to be careful because I have never swung a chainsaw. I have however spent some time with a high lead logging team on the West Coast and logging teams around Murapara and Kawarau.

FORESTRY AND CAREERS GUIDANCE / HUMAN RESOURCES:

The world of forestry has a massive branding issue as far as attracting new recruits. When someone talks about ‘forestry’ people think of chopping down trees; however, if you take an I Pencil / economic supply chain view, the industry looks like this:

  1. Biochemistry and agronomics: Development and propagation of high yield seedlings
  2. Civil Engineering: Development and layout of forestry plantations
  3. Silviculture: Supporting the growth of trees through pruning and pest management
  4. Forestry: Harvesting trees
  5. Transportation: Logs and processed wood products (land and sea)
  6. Manufacturing: Processing logs to create wood products
  7. Land Management and Finance: Carbon credits and hedging forestry investments

 

Depending on a young person’s strengths they could look into getting their chainsaw, HT license or tracks and wheels ticket to gain an entry-level job. Or, use tertiary level qualifications to work somewhere along the supply chain. You can even go to Canterbury and get a degree in forestry.

What’s the Answer?  Federated Farmers and NZ Dairy launched a massive marketing offensive over the last five years trying to attract people into dairying. They sold the ‘lifestyle’ and their Industry Training Organisation has laid out a roadmap for new farm managers.

Careers practitioners need to be taught about these options in forestry and employers need to ‘sell’ the benefits of the forestry lifestyle.

 

FORESTRY SAFETY:

Understanding the complex chain of events that leads to an accident or incident never ends in one fixed answer. Also, there is a big difference between an operation like Ernslaw One based at Naseby, and a small plantation that was created as a farmer’s retirement fund on the back blocks of their farm.

The first has spent a huge amount of time and money developing their in-house safety system, while the second has probably done the basics (if you are lucky) and is relying on the contractor to ‘get it right, for the right price’.

From the research I’ve done here are some of the key issues that forestry is facing:

  1. Forestry blocks planted on challenging terrain
  2. Tendering processes that encourage ‘cut price, cut corners’ operators
  3. Resistance to paying for mechanised harvesting
  4. Long travelling distances to get to work leading to fatigue (especially in the North Island)
  5. Supervisors on tools, or driving machines where they don’t have line of site on the operating area
  6. Drug and alcohol abuse (although this has greatly reduced over the last few years)
  7. Workers not following basic rules like ‘stand 2 tree lengths away’ when felling
  8. Poor traffic management on operating and storage sites
  9. The Kiwi ‘No. 8 Solutions’ attitude to safety (known in HSE as normalised deviance … we got away with ‘it’ so it’s not a problem)

 

What’s the Answer? To fix these issues the forestry industry needs to sit down and work out what are the differences between ‘Work as Imagined” and ‘Work as It Happens”. This, in my opinion, will mean focusing on three key areas:

  1. TENDERS: Having minimum safety thresholds for all tenders
  2. MECHANISATION: Using mechanised forestry techniques whenever possible
  3. CAPACITY: Having additional resources on site to ensure everyone is where they need to be and has the equipment and training to do their job safely.

 

I can almost hear the slipstream of rotten tomatoes coming my way over this blog and my views on forestry safety and the costs it will incur. My response will always be “how much is a human life worth?”

 

Your challenge for the week is to think about your business, what could go catastrophically wrong and how can you avoid it along your whole supply chain?

 

Have a safe and productive week,

 

SB

 

 

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