Fair warning
Fair warning
Fair warning
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20<br />
Spotlight<br />
The fall guy<br />
B.C.’s award-winning “faller whisperer” sets<br />
his sights on training today’s fallers to survive<br />
what remains a high-risk occupation.<br />
When Bill Boardman talks about his 33-year career as a<br />
faller, there’s a lot of passion in his voice for a job he says<br />
he was born to do. And there’s anger, too. A<br />
third-generation faller, Boardman grew up in a logging camp in<br />
Knight Inlet owned by his dad and granddad. Though he wasn’t a<br />
faller, his great grandfather worked in the woods, and was killed by<br />
a falling tree. Boardman has grieved the loss of 19 fallers during his<br />
four decades in the woods — among them were two of his closest<br />
friends.<br />
He’s become an outspoken critic of any working conditions that put<br />
fallers at risk.<br />
So when Boardman received the Cary White Memorial Award for<br />
Lifetime Achievement from the B.C. Forest Safety Council last fall,<br />
he accepted the honour with a mix of pride and sadness. He<br />
acknowledges that much needs to be done to make the forests safer<br />
for fallers. But those who’ve worked alongside the man known as<br />
the “faller whisperer,” say it’s safety-driven professionals like<br />
March / April 2013 WorkSafe Magazine<br />
By Kathy Eccles<br />
Boardman who offer hope for future generations working in the<br />
woods.<br />
Peter Sprout, manager of falling programs for the council, has<br />
worked with Boardman on new faller and remedial training. “I’ve<br />
sent him out to work with guys identified as having poor work<br />
practices. The first day they’re resentful. Pretty soon they’re sitting<br />
on a stump, saying, ‘I get it.’ He knows how to get into their heads.”<br />
“He has a unique way of getting his point across, and a rare talent<br />
for being demanding and diplomatic at the same time,” he says.<br />
“The students I see are glued to him.”<br />
Boardman says he remembers the days when fallers were looked up<br />
to like kings: they had their own table in the cookhouse and a<br />
separate bunkhouse. The work was steady, and others accorded the<br />
same respect to experienced fallers they might an ancient cedar.<br />
But controversy — and tragedy — has dogged the industry since the<br />
early 2000s, when falling became the focal point for the dangers in<br />
B.C.’s forests.