There is no bringing back Glenn Roche and Alan Little.
No one should go to work and never come home again, killed in a workplace accident, but that's what happened to them on the night of April 23, 2012, when an explosion and subsequent fire destroyed the Lakeland Mills facility in Prince George.
Another two dozen people were injured and many of them will never return to work, irrevocably damaged physically and mentally by the pain and loss they experienced that horrible spring night. For the Roche and Little families, as well as the living victims of the Lakeland tragedy, their grief traps them in time, in the immediate aftermath of what happened. Their feelings are still fresh and may remain so for the rest of their lives.
What adds to their suffering is that time has not stopped for the rest of the world. The sun has risen nearly a thousand times since, there have been births, weddings, warm summer days, Christmas mornings, laughter and celebration. Their wounds still hurt but a modern replacement mill has been built on the old site.
Roche, Little and their injured colleagues can be seen throughout the new sawmill, in all of the design changes to reduce the amount of sawdust that can build up - the operator control room walls framed to the ceiling, the lack of interior window sills, peaked interior roofs, enclosed process centres and the numerous suction pipes.
Before Lakeland and a similar fire and explosion took two more lives and injured another 20 men three months earlier at Babine Forest Products in Burns Lake, those kinds of sawmill designs were not seen as essential. It took those deaths, those injuries and the complete destruction of two sawmills to make these job sites safer for workers across the province.
Sadly, this is the history of the forest sector in B.C. Up until very recently, safety was optional. The good pay justified both the hard work and the risky conditions. In the largely male environment, a macho attitude, from workers right through management, took hold, instilling a culture where men kept quiet and did their jobs because nobody likes a crybaby about safety. Only idiots and rookies got hurt.
Fortunately, that ethic has changed for the most part but it cost many lives and many injuries over many decades, in the bush and in the mills. It is both wonderful and terrible that today's forest sector workers owe their increased safety to past tragedies. For the workers that return to Babine and Lakeland, as well as the new workers joining them, they owe their improved working conditions to men like Roche and Little.
There is no comfort in that realization for at least one widow.
"The owners have their super mill and will surely be even more highly profitable than before," Ronda Roche told the Globe and Mail this week. "They can carry on business as usual in the place that killed my husband, took my son's father."
Her frustration is easy to understand. Forest companies can build new and safer sawmills. Workers can have jobs in these new mills, making money to build a life for themselves and their families.
Everyone can "carry on."
Except for those, like Ronda Roche, who cannot just "carry on."
Who will come to rebuild her broken heart and her life? What share does she get of the profits and pay earned in a new sawmill built with the death of her husband in mind? Why should her suffering remain private and hidden away while everyone else gets to "carry on?"
Roche has carried on, of course, raising her son and doing what she can to build a new life, one without her husband. In that regard, she is no different from everyone else who has experienced the sudden, tragic and preventable death of a loved one.
The new Lakeland and Babine mills will be better - safer, more efficient and more productive. The lives of the victims of Lakeland and Babine will also be rebuilt and put back together but they will not be better. Their future days will still have laughter and happiness but they will also be more painful, sadder and emptier.
It is a wonderful day for Prince George that production is beginning again at Lakeland Mills, that the community and the company can overcome tragedy and rebuild, that life does "carry on," no matter what. But residents should never lose sight that the new mill and the new jobs came at great personal cost for an unfortunate few and being able to "carry on" for them is far more difficult than simply turning the page and greeting the new day.
