With the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic still persisting, BC Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry isn’t wasting any time in scaling back workers on major resource projects across Northern BC in an effort to stop the surge in hospitalizations within our health authority.
Before the new year commenced, Dr. Henry issued a notice to five major companies to only allow a baseline of employees at all sites, forcing thousands of workers to the sidelines temporarily.
The Ministry of Health issued a statement to Vista Radio pertaining to Dr. Henry’s latest order from December 23rd.
“Additionally, as I mentioned a number of times, we’ve had challenges in the north, and some of the challenges have been related to outbreaks that we’ve reported on in a number of the industrial work camps that are in the Northern health region.
We have been working with those large industrial camps and the employees that travel frequently to and from those camps, and as of today, I will be putting in a new order in place for industrial work camps in BC, and this work — this order will require work camps to do a phased, slower start-up in January.
The original intention and the nature of these industrial work camps mean that employees are frequently travelling to and from these work camps, and we know at the start of the year the camps typically see an influx of employees returning to the site from around BC, but also from other places outside the province.
This large movement of people means a much higher potential for spread both amongst employees, but also into communities along with the areas where the industrial camps are in the north, and right now we know that Northern Health is stretched both from a public health perspective, trying to manage and support communities where we have transmission, but also our health system where there are a number of people both in hospital and ICU in the north.
We are already seeing many small, rural, and remote communities in the north under strain, and the order that I will be giving will help to ease that pressure at the start of the year and ensure that our health system will be able to maintain the services that we need for everybody in the north. We have been in discussions with the major industrial projects now on how to make that happen, but that will happen so that we are not putting our communities at risk in January.
As we know, modelling has shown that the measures we are taking our work. I know the restrictions and the orders are difficult. But we also know that we have learned how to deal with this virus and we have learned that when we take those measures when we don’t have gatherings when we wash our hands when we cover our mouth when we wear our masks when we stay home when we’re ill when we work from home now as much as possible, and when we are careful about following our COVID safety plans in all settings, we know we can reduce and stop transmission of this virus.”Â
Projects that will be feeling the pinch include the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, the Coastal GasLink pipeline spanning from Dawson Creek to Kitimat, BC Hydro’s Site C dam project near Fort St. John, as well as the Trans Mountain Pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby, currently owned by Ottawa as well as the twinning of the tunnel near Kitimat that provides water to power Rio Tinto’s aluminum smelter.
Henry’s order noted that the CGL pipeline and Site C are only allowed to have 400 workers each.
LNG Canada will have slightly more employees at 450, while Rio Tinto is slated to see 160 and Trans Mountain Pipeline can have 50.
The provincial government in its report also unveiled a chart on potential worker increases, which could be seen as early as this month.
Northern Health continues to keep tabs on a pair of outbreaks still ongoing at CGL worksites within the 7 Mile Lodge (Burns Lake Health Authority) and the Little Lake Lodge (Nechako Health Area).
On Christmas Day, NH declared the COVID-19 outbreak at the LNG Canada site in Kitimat over.
However, the health authority continues to monitor another outbreak at the same facility among the staff of Diversified Transportation.
As of December 30th, 16 employees tested positive. There are now no active cases.
Also, Site C experienced a rash of cases and issued the latest update:
