WorkSafeBC
officials had investigated at least two cases where toxic gases had
knocked mushroom-farm workers unconscious before three people were
killed at a Langley mushroom farm in September 2008.
Despite
the previous incidents in 2006 and 2008, no broad warning was issued
to the province’s five companies that produce mushroom compost or
the 40 farms that use it.
On
July 24, 2008 — six weeks before the fatal incident in Langley —
a Central Composting employee was hospitalized, overcome in the
composting barn by deadly fumes including ammonia and methane in an
oxygen-depleted environment in Abbotsford.
Along
with an ambulance, two WorkSafe officials attended the incident.
A
stop-work order was issued over fears that gases in the composting
barn and its bunkers presented a risk of injury, serious illness or
even death.
The
next day, work resumed when officials returned to the site and deemed
the imminent risk to employees had passed.
The
WorkSafeBC inspectors noted the worker who fell ill was likely
dehydrated, exposed to toxic gases and not properly equipped with a
respirator. They also found Central Composting lacked an “exposure
control plan,” a long-standing requirement for workplaces with
harmful air contaminants above an acceptable limit.
Composting
facilities regularly produce hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, methane and
carbon dioxide.
Numerous
other safety violations were cited at Central Composting. The farm
had no occupational health and safety program; workers were not
wearing properly fitting respiratory equipment; and there was no
safety program to manage hazardous chemicals.
Nearly
two years before the incident at Central Composting a contractor was
injured when overcome by methane after climbing into a tank at nearby
Mountainview Mushrooms, which was found to be lacking first aid
procedures as well. No further details were available, except that it
took that company four years to achieve compliance for its own
exposure control plan.
It
wasn’t until after the fatal incident in Langley that officials
took a close look at safety in the mushroom industry.
On
Sept. 5, 2008, Han Pham, Ut Van Tran and Jimmy Chan, workers at
now-bankrupt A-1 Mushroom Substratum Ltd., were killed after
breathing in hydrogen sulphide and ammonia while in a pump shed at a
facility in Langley. Michael Phan and Thang Tchen survived but with
severe brain damage.
After
the deaths, which prompted a two-year investigation and a coroner’s
inquest, WorkSafeBC inspected the province’s five mushroom
composting facilities and close to 40 white mushroom farms. It also
renewed enforcement of the Workers’ Compensation Act regulation
requiring employers to create and maintain an exposure control plan
to educate workers on safety when there are toxic gases in the
workplace.
A
now-retired B.C. environmental worker, who also had a role in
monitoring the farms, said the previous incidents should have raised
a “red flag” for regulators and industry.
Linda
Vanderhoek, who worked for the Ministry of Environment for 37 years
before retiring in January, said she regularly visited both A-1
Mushrooms and Central Composting as an environmental protection
officer. She knew about the problems at the Langley farm but was
shocked to learn a worker had previously fainted at Central.
She
said a “heads-up” from WorkSafe to inspectors and industry would
have been helpful, to send a message the job sites could be unsafe.
But
there’s no formal mechanism to relay the information, especially
across departments, Vanderhoek noted. “Each agency has their own
mandate and there should be better communication among us, I guess.”
It
should have been “a red flag for something that killed people six
weeks later,” Vanderhoek said.
WorkSafeBC
said there was no reason to suspect the industry had widespread
problems after the worker became ill at Central Composting.
“The
jobs being done were completely different. Everybody knows there’s
gases produced at those types of job sites, but you wouldn’t have
been able to infer from one that the other would be hazardous. It was
a different set of circumstances,” said regional prevention manager
Burt Goulding.
Workers
at A-1 Mushroom were in a confined space with no understanding of the
risks posed by hydrogen sulphide, and few safe work procedures were
in place overall.
At
Central Composting, workers were completing daily tasks when one
entered an oxygen-depleted building without a safety mask. But
WorkSafe considered the job site generally safe.
“There
was minimal attention paid to safety at the A-1 work site. The other
one had safe work procedures that weren’t followed properly by the
workers,” Goulding said. “There is a similarity in the hazards in
that type of industry, yes. And the employer has to deal with the
hazards appropriately. Which wasn’t done in A-1’s case.”
But
Central Composting didn’t have a formal exposure control plan at
the time, or even a health and safety committee. Though the employer
had begun implementing both by August 2008, it was only considered
compliant in June 2010, nearly two years after the incident.
“After
the A-1 thing happened, WCB came down and talked to us about it,”
said Balbir Randhawa, manager of Central Composting. “We had to do
the exposure plan and we complied to all that. Before that, a lot of
people didn’t know about the H2S [hydrogen sulphide] gas. Even I
didn’t.”
The
injured worker recovered and still works for Central Composting,
Randhawa said.
All
10 employees received better training, now wear gas monitors to
ensure safe levels, and the building was retrofitted for better
ventilation, he said.
Randhawa
added he’s proud of the company’s safety precautions and there
have been no serious incidents since 2008.
'We
were fortunate there wasn’t anything major,” he said.
