Heavy equipment operator Tyler Hall didn’t plan on getting hurt at work that day, but then again nobody does.
Hall, 29, was injured Dec. 9 while working alone on a construction site. He was putting rocks in a crushing machine when the machine jammed. He peeked in the hopper to see why the mechanism that clears the rocks out wasn’t working.
A rock six inches wide and three inches thick flew out and hit him on the head, he said. “I panicked.”
Hall jumped in his truck and drove to the first aid trailer and was taken to hospital. It was three months before Hall felt back to normal.
“I had every single symptom except for nausea,” Hall said. “Everything made sense in my head, but as soon as I tried to say it, it would just come out as a big jumbled mess – it didn’t make any sense.”
In the Sea to Sky Corridor, 469 workers suffered a serious work injury between 2010 to 2014, according to WorkSafeBC data.
Each worker has his or her own unique story of pain, time off work and recovery.
Hall’s friends and family became increasingly worried in the weeks after his head injury, he recounted, adding he began to become depressed. His somewhat macho personality didn’t help matters, Hall acknowledged.
“I just need time to recover most of the time, I just need my own personal time,” he said. “That kind of hindered me very, very much, because my friends didn’t really come around, my family came around but not as much as I had hoped.” The isolation deepened the feeling of depression, he said.
Through workers’ compensation he was able to see a psychiatrist who helped him understand his injury, its symptoms and the course of recovery.
Hall was back to work full-time last week.
“Nobody ever thinks it is going to happen to them,” he said.
A worker being struck by something is the most common on the job injury across all industries in the corridor, according to WorkSafeBC.
Falls from elevation are the second most common injury.
“Given your location, you have workers that might be on bikes, on skis and various things,” said Jacqueline Holmes, field services prevention manager at WorkSafeBC.
Men ages 25 to 54 suffer most injuries in the Sea to Sky region.
Holmes said one theory is that perhaps men take more risks on the job.
“They go out there thinking, ‘Maybe I can do this job and I don’t need to ask questions and I can soldier through,’” she said. “Younger men, and as people get older, they get more confident in their work and perhaps over-confident.”
The service sector, which includes hospitality, recreation industries, restaurants and hotels, dominates injuries in the Sea to Sky Corridor.
Although some accidents, like Hall’s, are hard for employers or workers to foresee, across all sectors, employers are ultimately responsible for the safety of their workers, Holmes said.
WorkSafe officers do inspections in the field as well as conducting consultation and education, according to Holmes.
When violations occur, for example when a guardrail is not installed and someone is at risk of falling, an order is issued to the employer.
If there is immediate risk of serious injury or death, quite often the employer will be penalized financially without a warning, Holmes said – “all the way from a citation to a warning letter to a penalty, those all are motivational tools to get the employer to comply with the regulation.”
In 2015, across B.C., 284 WorkSafe BC prevention and investigation officers imposed 30,049 orders and 564 penalties, according to the corporation.
As for Hall, he was on a Squamish construction site this week, feeling well.
“I am great, I am fantastic now,” he said.
