Safety leader in B.C. influenced by wilderness work that was 'definitely unsafe'
For more than three decades Barry Nakahara has been shaping workplace safety in British Columbia, and it all started with the treacherous work of tree planting.
“The thing that is most rewarding is when you see that your work has made a difference,” says the senior manager of prevention field services at WorkSafeBC. “Sometimes that is a direct result of your involvement with a specific workplace on a specific issue or sometimes it’s a broader change that occurs across an industry, which takes more effort and more time, but is equally rewarding.”
Nakahara first started making a difference in his workplace in BC’s backcountry as a tree planter in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It was summer work while studying kinesiology at Simon Fraser University and before enrolling in the occupational health and industrial hygiene master’s program at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
“I just saw so many things that were definitely unsafe,” says Nakahara as he reminisces about those gruelling days covered in bug bites as he bounced along in the back of a van carrying him and fellow planters between campsites and plant sites in the bush.
“Every year I was hearing about a vehicle fatality… I really didn't like getting into the crew vans with some of the drivers and many of the vans were just garbage,” explains Nakahara. He took matters into his own hands, placing them on the steering wheel, after getting his Class 4 driver’s license. “I wanted to be the person in control of the vehicle, not trusting some other person who was driving recklessly.”
But the hazards of the wilderness can’t always be controlled. Nakahara contracted giardia from bad drinking water. He witnessed people suffer from hypothermia, scale dangerous slopes and steep rock bluffs, and suffer all kinds of ergonomic injuries. “People hurting and working through injuries… a whole mix of both exposure issues and straight up safety issues.”
The experience laid the bedrock for his future career and when Nakahara graduated from UBC, he knew his professional life would be rooted in safety. His first gig was, unsurprisingly, in the forestry sector, but instead of being out in the bush, he was focused on industrial hygiene and environmental safety at a pulp and paper mill with Northwood Inc. It would later become Canadian Forest Products.
Nakahara was with them for about four and a half years, before joining his current organization, WorkSafeBC, in 2000. Since then, he’s climbed the ladder at the regulatory agency beginning as an inspector, then a supervisor, then regional manager, and now a senior manager.
Over that time Nakahara has watched industry in the province grow its safety culture. He sees safety in job postings as a qualification for supervisor or manager roles. “There's definitely more awareness of health and safety and I feel overall more attention is being put to workplace health and safety.”
But Nakahara knows safety work is never done. He says his biggest challenge right now is communication, both internally and externally. There are more than 250,000 employers in BC, and it can be difficult to reach them all.
“Employers come and go, there are many transient workplaces, small jobs, odd jobs here and there…they're hard to connect with, they're hard to engage.”
Nakahara also must help hundreds of safety professionals read from the same playbook. They all have different, sometimes competing, ideas of how best to achieve the same goals, “and making sure we're taking in those ideas in terms of developing our approaches and strategies and initiatives. But at the same time, once we develop those, it's communicating that back down and monitoring what's happening and making sure that the business is kind of all moving in the same direction.”
No easy feat, even for the most experienced safety leaders. But, not quite as dangerous as battling the elements in the BC bush.
