Workplace deaths and injuries have almost as big an effect on families as they do on the victims themselves.
That was the message from Mel Camilli, who lost his legs in a logging accident, and Lisa Arlint, whose father died in a treefalling mishap, when they spoke to a small crowd that gathered for a noontime memorial Thursday at Connaught Hill Park to mourn workers who've have been killed, injured or suffered illness as a result of their job.
Camilli, a married 45-year-old father of two, suffered his injury 24 years ago while working on Princess Royal Island, but the sight of him in a wheelchair still brings tears to his own father's eyes.
"Still to this day, my accident is very difficult for my dad," he said through a sob. "It's not easy making your dad cry, it's not a good feeling," said Camilli, a native of Fernie now living in the Lower Mainland.
Camilli, who was crushed by a log being transported by a grapple yarder, urged both employees and workers to take the steps to ensure other fathers don't have to feel the same emotions.
Arlint, a married 33-year-old mother of two, said her father, a falling contractor who ran a family business, died five days before Christmas 2005 near Dawson Creek while working for an oil and gas exploration company.
He was filling in for Arlint's brother when two trees got hung up on a standing tree and he tried to free them by cutting down the standing tree only to have them fall on him.
"My dad lay there all alone suffering for four long hours," Arlint said. "Just before he passed, my uncle found dad and he died in his brother's arms.
"My father was 52 years old, a strong, healthy family man who had never had a workplace injury before. He was the whole world to us, we all looked up to him."
His loss made it the worst Christmas ever, Boxing Day was spent shopping for clothes to bury her father in and the family business was dissolved.
"Feeling awful about my dad taking his place that day, my brother couldn't work in the bush again until this winter when he got back out there on an oil pipeline," said Arlint, who grew up in Fort St. John and now lives in Grande Prairie.
"My mother moved away to live my grandmother and her people in Telegraph Creek. That's 500 miles away, so in a way I had lost both parents almost."
The company who hired her father's crew was fined $150,00, twice the standard WorkSafeBC fine.
"I hate that company," Arlint said. "Maybe they didn't kill [my father] Rusty Testawich but they didn't do a very good job of keeping him alive. There were no safety people, there was no protocol for emergencies like my dad's."
In B.C. 143 people died from workplace accidents or related injuries last year, of which 41 were traumatic, 27 were on-the-job motor vehicle accidents and 75 were occupational exposures. WorkSafeBC claims services vice president Ian Munroe noted northern B.C. has now gone 19 months without a traumatic workplace fatality, compared to nine such deaths in 2005 and seven in 2006.
But there's more work to be done.
"We want to be on a road to zero -- zero fatalities, zero serious injuries," Munroe said.
