Russell Claus takes the WFCA stage on work safety

Forestry employment safety protocols

VICTORIA, B.C. - Russell Claus is a volunteer with Threads of Life, who, in the summer of 2010, suffered a workplace injury that changed his life forever.

Claus spoke at WFCA 2024 Annual Conference on Jan 31 in the afternoon. "I was a tree planter," he said, on behalf of Threads of Life, as he focused on Canadian families dealing with workplace fatalities.

"I am with the speakers bureau of the organization. I am here to make the face of tragedy real. I was 25 years old on a hot July day when I suffered workplace injury."

Claus explained how it was a great time in his life, as he was engaged to marry, and studying at University of Victoria when he went north in May of that year to go tree planting.

"It was the same each morning, wake-up, go to the mess tent, then to the crew vehicle, and arrive at the cut block to plant trees.

"From May to late July, I lost 15 pounds, I was hypoglycemic, but I pushed myself especially toward the end of the planting season, working hard through the pain, fatigue, and feeling unwell.

"It was the last full-day of the planting year, so we set big numbers for ourselves and decided to go for it. Sure it was a hot day, but we had favorable grounds. As the day progressed, I began to feel nauseous, dehydrated, and heat exhausted, yet I went on despite knowing better. By the time the day ended I felt very bad.

"We drove around the cut-block," to wrap up this worksite, gathering personnel and equipment. Everybody was happy, but Claus was becoming sick. "I needed to stop and get sick. I insisted we stop on a pullout. I got out and moved up beside the front, driver's side of the running truck. I knew Kyle had got out of the driver's seat and went to the back of the vehicle. I leaned around the front of the vehicle to wave him off. But he wasn't there."

Kyle, unbeknownst to Claus, was behind the wheel again when suddenly a loaded truck approached to pass on the single lane logging road, and Kyle, the driver, had, "lost sight of me. He needed to move aside for the loaded log hauler, so he hit the gas. I was leaning in front of the vehicle and he hit me, causing me to ask, 'Why is the truck moving?'"

The front passenger side wheel rolled over his hip. "I felt the exhaust pipe burning a hole in my shoulder."

Unfortunately the drills to prepare an emergency response vehicle were the responsibility of Claus. He was the one who had trained for it. "I was underneath the vehicle and tried to crawl out. I wondered if I could move my feet, so I wiggled my toes and concluded it was not paralysis. Most of the pain was in the burned shoulder, and a coworker grabbed my arm and pulled me out from under the vehicle.

"I asked them to roll me over, where I felt pain in the hips and groin. My pelvis was broken in five places, the urethra severed, and there were other complications."

The 50 minutes of egress from the workplace were the most painful in his life, laying on a wooden board, bouncing down an an unpaved logging road, contemplating all these fearsome injuries. He was yet thirsty from dehydration and heat exhaustion, and knew not what to do, so, "I began to assess myself," all the while his bladder filling with blood at the severed urethra.

"I wondered what was ruptured and calculating how much time I had to live within the timeframe of the journey, I decided I was going to die on the way to town, due to my trained estimate of the survival rate from the injuries, and the estimated time of arrival at a hospital. I took off my oxygen mask and told them there is no way I am going to make it so let me go.

"I went into semiconsciousness," and they reattached oxygen while Claus had given in to (what appeared to be) his inevitable death. "I was seeing shadows of trees whip by," eventually startled awake at the transfer from stretcher to gurney at the hospital. He has never forgotten the resignation in his situation so close to death's door. He is struck to this day by the comfort he had taken from this resignation.

The doctors dealt with the repair to the bladder to stanch internal bleeding, and began assessment of the myriad injuries. Reconstructive surgeries would ensue. Injuries fatigued him and morphine dragged him down to kill the pain.

He went to Prince George, and in the hospital it was quiet and dim, he was alone, where he was saddled with a superpubic catheter, pain radiating up from his lower torso, "My mind began to ask what had happened to me. I felt tears come into my eyes. I was scared, defeated, alone. My fiance arrived, and months of rehab and recovery, and surgery took place."

Claus was wheelchair-bound, muscles atrophied on pain killers, and says he fell into a state of complete dependency, suffering sleepless nights with raging restless leg syndrome, common bodily functions gone missing in action, uncertainty in his romantic relationship, "Would I walk, limp, have sex? I had no answers."

More surgery came and went. What remained was uncertainty of recovery, "I did begin to recover in a way, but cramps, high blood pressure, extensive nerve damage, antibiotic exhaustion, multiple urinary tract infections, plus the mental impact from the scarring, having sweating hands, fear of crossing streets, a return to school was unmanageable."

He realized in the depths of making it from sick to recovery, some of the search for wellness wasn't going to come to pass. He wasn't going to be the same. "It's not the same life. I do hike the West Coast Trail," (difficult to imagine doing this in the face of chronic pain and life-long complications).

At this moment in his talk, Claus turned to the subject of family, friends, and coworkers. The first rumination was about Kyle, who came forth, and Claus learned he had attempted suicide after the incident, "I am still in his dreams in a bad way.

"Helene, we spoke differently to each other after the incident, we got married, but we are not any more. She was so spent from managing my life, it was huge PTSD to her.

"What I learned. I thought 'whatever' but if you get hurt at work, others bear the injury for the rest of their lives."

He works in health and safety. "It's my job to put the information and training out there, to teach safe and supervised work, advocate for safety-oriented changes, and ask for vigilence in finding experienced crew chiefs. Sometimes the amount of supervision they have is as little as two months.

"Do I question how our work is structured? My pushing hard that day was costly to my health, and almost cost me my life." It was the challenge and the opportunity which drove him past the boundaries of safety.

"I was a young worker when that happened, but plenty of people continue to work around heavy equipment, and must always remember, lapses in concentration and failure to comply to regulations and standards of practice in the field will cause a rippling effect."

Reach out to Threads of Life

Claus currently resides in Halifax, N.S., where he works in occupational health and safety. Originally from Victoria, B.C., he completed his Master’s degree at McMaster University where his studies and thesis focused on worker safety in the resource sector.

Q & A
Q. Did you have counseling in the care after the incident?

A. I was required to get counseling and family was also availed of counseling services. Through Critical Incident Management programs, there is treatment for psychological injuries, immediate counseling and support is made available to those in critical incidents.

Freelance Writing by Malcolm 'Mack' McColl

A short sermon on the mechanics and benefits of better training

One unit of mechanical horsepower is equal to lifting 550 lbs (250 kg) one foot (30 cm) in one second. A horse is capable of around 15 horsepower at peak capacity. An average human might be capable of producing 1.2 horsepower as a peak: extraordinary humans—like some tree planting forestry workers—might be two to three times that, says WFCA

But the real consideration, when it comes to the work day, is sustainable horsepower. Most humans are capable .01 horsepower of sustained effort: athletes twice that. This would mean the whole available human horsepower for B.C.’s tree planting sector is around 300 to 400 horsepower.

By comparison, a dirt bike averages 30 horsepower (and we know how useful they are—picture ten of them doing donuts all day in a landing as equal to a day’s provincial planting effort.)

So, the question is how do we plant an average 250 million seedlings each year while seeming so under powered?

Part of the answer is our Cro-Magnon heritage which includes a primitive capacity for physical endurance. Another is our ability to fashion tools, like other clever primates, giving us some mechanical advantage. What a happy evolutionary coincidence then that humans are so well suited to planting trees.

Nevertheless, running the business end of a first-class lever (shovel) all day requires more than brute strength and instinct. And this is the point of this missive: skill requires experience and training. We may be capable of many things, but like all complicated species we do need to learn, mostly through example and instruction. As Jonathan “Scooter” Clark provided ample evidence at this year’s annual WFCA conference.

Tree planters, like other clever primates, do better when they are properly taught. In Scooter’s case his efforts to train rookies have shown workers lasting longer while doubling and tripling their seasonal productivity compared to days when less effort was invested in new recruits. (For the full story click here) [https://jonathan-scooter-clark.blogspot.com/2018/03/step-by-step.html]

The point then is, as the forestry sector finds itself competing for talent with the rest of the economy, making the best of our available candidates is critical. The old Darwinian days of letting recruits learn on their own, with the resulting thinning of the ranks, is a human resource profligacy we can no longer afford.

A Landscape Ecologist, a Mayor and a Sociologist Walk Into a Forestry Conference

WFCA Conference panelists, Landscape Ecologist Dr. Paul Hessburg, Quesnel Mayor Bob Simpson and Psychologist Dr. Robin Cox characterized the kinds of dimensions and scales of collaboration we will need to enlist to adapt to climate change as citizens and forestry practitioners.

It’s been an animated year so far for B.C. forestry conferences. The TLA annual convention was well attended again. The 2019 ABCFP conference was sold out weeks in advance. And the WFCA event at the end of January had our largest attendance ever. For those of us who organize these things we like to think it’s our programs that are so attractive. But there’s likely something else drawing people together lately in such strength.

It might be in part the shared feeling of pending change—a collective, Are you seeing this too? The sense of being on the cusp of something significant seems shared across a range of dimensions and scales from business relationships to the policy around climate change and its consequences.

Our WFCA conference panel that put an ecologist, a mayor and a sociologist on the stage to discuss forestry and its role in our adaption to climate change may well have caught that zeitgeist.

We need to plan and act at a landscape level. We need to understand the dynamics gaining momentum across forest ecosystems and work with them.

And we need to give our communities and citizens a sense of agency lest they become demoralized in the face of coming events. Given what history is just beginning to ask of forestry in aiding society to live with wildfire and other natural disasters it may be something for which only a collective response can answer.

It’s right and timely then that these conferences are attracting good crowds and the thinking and sharing that goes with them. We will need more of this kind of collaboration heading into the future by the looks of it.

Strategy is there but WFCA wonders if regulations are disappearing

The Western Silviculture Contractors Association (WSCA) is delivering tree-planting training this year through the federally funded and provincially administered Community Development Trust Fund. John Betts, WSCA Executive Director, says, "First Nations are training in driving on resource roads, operating brush saws, running all-terrain-vehicles, and driving crew buses," on highways and resource roads.
     

"We delivered training last year in the Chilcotin and Blue Collar Silviculture's Mark Courtney instructed a class in the field. It was an opportunity for the First Nation trainees to experience the life of a tree planter in a forestry bush camp," says Betts. He believes training in these close quarters produces an excellent outcome for silviculture contractors. 
     

"The trainees get the inside track on the 'stocking' standards in B.C. forestry," which species of trees are used, and the spacing and placement requirements of the seedlings. Betts notes that the province of B.C. has been depending on nature to take it's course in regeneration of forests. 
     

"We have seen a lower priority given to stocking the forests with seedlings. We went from planting 250 million seedlings a couple years ago to planting 160 million this year," and even fewer next year. He says that 40 percent of the MPB ravaged landscape is not growing any new trees. 
     

"We have 18 million hectares of MPB degraded forests in B.C. alone," including forests eaten by the spruce bud worm. "We have many areas with bug kill, other blights, and forest fire burned areas where restoration is being ignored." Betts notes that arguments made by Keith Atkinson, CEO of the First Nation Forestry Council, correctly identify the problems in a sketchy funding regime.
     

"The FNFC recognizes that we have crushing regeneration issues and huge demands for landscape level replanting operations," including transmission line corridors, highways, and watersheds. Electrical grid failure is just one of the threats in the forest fire (inferno) scenario. Destruction of watersheds also demands more attention."
     

Meanwhile the province is overrun by environment lobbies that want to lock-down forestry operations, "They are not recognizing the problem. Leaving forests alone is perilous when fires are increasing in number and severity." Betts notes that historically First Nations used a lot of fire to manage forests and make them produce specific plants, trees, and ecologies.
     
"The so-called natural fires have been eliminated by suppression and fire is gone as a forestry management tool. In place of managed fires the unnatural fires we see are non-renewing events." The intensity of these unnatural fires wipes out water resources, aquatic plants included, and all the grasses and trees in an ecology disappear. 
     

Worst of all, the soil gets super-heated and destroyed as an eco-system. Unfortunately, says Betts, "We see no real strategy and the demand is growing to get involved with biomass reclamation and refurbishing of these provincial forests.
     

"Nature won't be fooled. Interior forests are being left behind, whereas these landscapes require a change in strategy." First Nations are blazing the trail in the pursuit of a biomass economy from these decadent forests. "They see perpetual employment and management requirements for the eco-systems in their territories."
     

Betts believes the existing proposals for use of biomass are too large, and should be made smaller than those seen in the BC HYDRO call for power scenarios, like the 40 MWh cogeneration plant in Gitxsan and the 60 MWh plant in T'silcotin. "Go smaller, scale back the size of the projects to 1 to 5 MWh and make more of them," because smaller plants make more efficient use of biomass to create electricity."
     

While restoration strategies are in place the regulations behind it are being deleted left and right, and, Betts adds, "The premier may say, 'Well I'm not getting any calls on this,' but it appears that overall he's not paying attention to a degrading public resource."