a conveyor guard may have saved his life - Workplace Safety North

“You do things a certain way and eventually you
forget there’s any danger involved. A lot of times
I’ve asked myself what does it take to get the
message through to people?"
He decided to fight. He somehow got to his feet, reached inside
his clothes to try to stop the bleeding and started walking back
down the conveyor way for help. He managed to make it all
the way to the mill, some 400 metres from the incident scene.
“The first person I saw couldn’t handle it – he turned around
and screamed and basically ran away from me. Shawn, the
lead hand on our shift, was the one who started the first aid
and got everything rolling.”
Bill and Shawn were both volunteer firefighters – Bill in
Timmins, Shawn in nearby Schumacher. As part of their
firefighter duties they had taken a first responder’s course
a month prior to the incident. “Shawn knew from the course
that it was really important to stay calm,” Bill says. “He kept
talking to me while we waited for the ambulance and that
kept me calm.”
Bill spent close to eight hours in surgery that night. Doctors
tried to reattach his right arm, but his chest, back and neck
were too badly mangled. When he awoke from the surgery
he saw that his arm wasn’t there. The thought swirling in his
mind was: “What have I done to my family?”
That first surgery was followed by six months of shuttling
between Timmins and Toronto as doctors worked to rebuild
Bill’s devastated right side. It was during this period that Bill
went into an emotional tailspin.
“Once everything calmed down and I knew I was going to
survive, I guess you could say the novelty wore off,” he says.
“I was disabled. Everything I was used to doing I couldn’t do
anymore. The hardest part for me was admitting to myself that
I had made a big mistake that night. I really beat myself up for
having done such a stupid thing.”
Bill gets emotional when he talks about how his wife stood
by him through the long period of physical and emotional
recovery. “She was there for me when I hit bottom. She was
there to see me through it all. The strength of my family and
friends is what pulled me through. Even now if I have a hard
day, my family is there for me.”
Bill’s son Liam is 13 now, and his younger son, Tyler, is nine.
The only dad they know is the one with a missing arm – the
one who placed second in the above-elbow amputee category
at the Canadian Amputee Golf Association National Open
in London in the summer of 2009. “I’ve learned to be very
stubborn,” Bill chuckles about his one-armed golfing prowess.
“I shoot in the mid-80s all the time.” That same attitude has
helped him in his overall adjustment. He hasn’t worn his
prosthetic arm for more than four years.
Looking back on that September night in 1999, Bill is certain
about one thing: If the guards had not been on the conveyor,
his entire upper body would have been pulled in, his head
would have been crushed and he would have died instantly.
Even with the guards in place, if his left hand had been snared
instead of his right, his heart would probably have been torn
out of his chest.
There was nothing exceptional about the mistake Bill made
that night. He had been taking the same chances around the
conveyor throughout the three and a half years he worked at
the mining company. The odds simply caught up with him,
and in a dangerous work environment even a small mistake
can be lethal.
The lesson Bill learned is a complicated one that continues
to ripple through his life, but the message he wants to
communicate is very simple: “Complacency kills,” he says.
“You do things a certain way and eventually you forget there’s
any danger involved. A lot of times I’ve asked myself what
does it take to get the message through to people? Lock out the
conveyors before you work on them. Take a look first, because
complacency kills.”
These days Bill visits local high schools to talk to students about
dangers in the workplace. He urges them to ask questions at
work if they’re unsure about how to do something or if they
think it might not be safe. His present job as a designer/
draftsman at the Timmins office of J.L. Richards & Associate,
an engineering firm with offices across Ontario, takes him to
a lot of mine sites where he is sometimes asked to have a chat
with the workers.
“When they see me and I tell them about what happened to me,
they pay attention,” Bill says. “I figure if I can reach out and get
one person to stop and think – if I can prevent one person from
going through what I went through – it’s worth all the effort.”
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