WorksafeBC completes investigation into two mill explosions

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It will now be in the hands of the Crown to decide whether any charges will be laid after a pair of explosions killed four workers.

WorkSafeBC has finished its long investigation into the explosions at the Babine Forest Products Company in Burns Lake in January and at the Lakeland Mills in Prince George. Both happened earlier this year and injured 42 workers on top of those dead.

Roberta Ellis with WorkSafeBC says investigators are now working on putting together a package that they’ll forward to the Crown.  “Thousands of photographs, thousands of pages of interviews with witnesses, all of that has to be prepared now.” She says it’ll likely take until January to complete.

Ellis says the Crown investigations are not criminal, but are under the authority of the Workers’ Compensation Act and could result in fines of up to $500,000 and maximum jail terms of six months.

She says investigations into both explosions have found that sawmill dust was an ignition factor in the blasts, but it hasn’t been proven the dust was the sole factor in the explosions.

Melvin Joseph has worked at the Burns Lake Mill for two decades and says he would have liked to receive the news from WorkSafeBC in person. “Something like this is very important to us, if they were going to announce it they should have had some WorkSafeBC workers here talking to us”

Burns Lake Mayor Luke Strimbold says it’s taken an emotional charge on the community but the workers are bonding together.

“They were feeling that it’s a challenging process, it’s hard for them to understand what’s going on, there’s questions to be asked, and they’re looking for answers,” says Strimbold.

Ellis says WorkSafeBC has only referred about a dozen cases to the Crown for further investigation since 1999.