Workers in Calgary are advocating for workplace safety reforms after a man died in a trench collapse on Thursday.
Carol Henke, fire department spokesperson, confirmed to Global News that emergency crews were called to the 2600 block of 34th Avenue N.W., in the community of Charleswood, at around 10:45 a.m. Thursday for reports a trench had collapsed.
The battalion chief said that there was no trench box in place initially, so crews had to place one before they could safely enter the trench.
Liam Johnston, 27, was pronounced dead at the scene. Johnston was working for Mr. Mike’s Plumbing at the time of the incident.
Jon Malley, a former apprentice plumber with Mr. Mike’s, told Global News he requested a trench box from management last March.
“I had a meeting with the management and I told them it’s a matter of time before somebody gets killed,” Malley said.
“I knew Liam. We became apprentices together. He was a stand-up guy. ”
In an earlier statement, the company said safety is its top priority and said it’s working with authorities to understand the circumstances of the incident to ensure the appropriate measures are taken to prevent any future incidents.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Mr. Mike’s issued a second statement to Global News indicating the company would not provide further comment on “the tragic incident and the allegations made by previous employees.”
“We understand the importance of transparency and accountability. However, in order to protect the integrity of the investigation and maintain a fair and unbiased approach, we have made the decision not to provide any additional comments or interviews beyond the statement already released.”
Pete Archdekin, owner of Pete The Plumber, said the incident was tragic and should have never happened.
He told Global News the government of Alberta’s occupational health and safety manual protects people working in holes and tunnels.
Workers also have to take certified courses on how to safely work in tight spaces, he said.
“If that was followed, anybody can go down the hole. You can go down the hole if it’s properly shored, if the proper excavations done, if proper safety things were followed,” Archdekin said.
Archedekin added these incidents are very rare, and deaths usually happen if there was a gas valve problem or if there were high carbon monoxide levels.
“That young man should have been in that hole to do his job. You got to get to the pipe. The pipe is where it is right here. There’s no magic way to get down there,” he said.
“You hear very few excavation problems on residential projects. Very, very few.”
Rob Stewart, a safety scientist, said people have known to prevent tragic incidents like trench collapses for decades.
It is physically impossible for the trench to collapse onto somebody if the proper safety procedures and regulations were followed, Stewart said.
“The unfortunate thing is we have all these really good regulations and a lot of them aren’t followed. I think in Alberta, 50 per cent of employers aren’t following basic safety regulations and it usually goes well until it doesn’t,” Stewart told Global News.
“We don’t have very much of a deterrent effect to prevent it from happening again in the future.”
Stewart said a lot of people are afraid to speak up about unsafe working conditions because they might lose their jobs. The Alberta government needs to be stricter with the enforcement of fines and punishments for unsafe working conditions so it will deter companies from doing so.
“You can have the best laws out there, but if there’s no enforcement there is no reasonable likelihood of being caught if the fines aren’t sufficient to change behaviours,” he said.
But this problem isn’t an Alberta problem. Stewart said a lot of people are killed in trenches every year across North America.
“There has to be a behaviour change overall. It has to come from the employers themselves. You can’t expect workers to institute their right to refuse work. That’s not the way that happens,” he said.
“We know from basic human psychology that they will basically go along with the crowd, or if their boss says to do something they will follow through on it because they want to keep their job.
“We need the same sort of consequences, life-altering consequences generally through the Criminal Code that we put on to workers. In this case, we need to put people in jail.”
— with files from Ryan White, Global News.
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