construction

"All we can hope for as a family is workplace safety." So said the aunt of a 24-year-old man killed in Toronto this week when a drilling rig fell onto his front-end loader on a construction site.

Kyle Knox's body was trapped within the cab of his loader for almost a day; he was pronounced dead at the scene. Five other male workers were hurt by the rig which also fell on top of a backhoe; they were all hospitalized with minor to major injuries.

We're deep into the dog days of summer - lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer - and while many of us are hitting the beaches and lakes and soaking in the rays, we actually have more to fear from the sun than just high UV and skin cancer. Working in the sun - specifically, under-hydrated, overexposed, unprotected work - can result in illness, and even fatality, during the hottest months of the year.

Duane Craig writes in his excellent article, Manslaughter on the Jobsite at the blog, The Construction Informer: "There is another side to safety on construction sites... the overwhelming difficulty in getting people to voluntarily comply with safety rules on the job and having enough visibility into what is really going on to make them think twice about not complying."

Teen Crushed to Death by Forklift reads the headline today: a 16-year-old kid on the second day of his job at a Rona lumberyard in Alberta. Apparently Mitchell Tanner was hanging off the side of a forklift as it was being driven, and the vehicle tipped over on top of Mitchell.

He's only 10 years old but he's been visiting construction sites for several years, with his dad - and he's always fully decked out in safety gear. Philipe Mathers of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, says he wants to be a safety inspector when he grows up.

I came across this news item, "Never Too Young to be Safe" and thought it was worth sharing.