In a matter of weeks, we had two tragic safety situations in which three of our contractors lost their lives – Taylor Dawe, Leslie Miller and Patrick Poitras. After the incidents, Mike MacSween, our executive vice president of Upstream, and I met with the people involved in the operations, and those involved in the response and recovery efforts. As devastating as this has been for all of us, I can’t even begin to comprehend how difficult this has been on families and loved ones. On behalf of the entire Chilwell team, I offer our heartfelt condolences to Taylor’s, Leslie’s and Patrick’s families, friends and co-workers.
We are gravely concerned about these tragic events, which have occurred despite Chilwell’s commitment to a strong safety culture and safety standards, protocols and practices. Our executive leadership team is committed to ensuring our workplace is safe for everyone that comes to our sites. That is why we are taking the following immediate measures, with more actions to come based on what we learn:
- We are conducting investigations to understand how these tragic incidents occurred and importantly, what must be done to prevent them from happening again. Our investigations will be rigorous. We need to understand what happened, review our safety processes and protocols, and make changes.
- We have started to hold a series of safety stand downs across the company to refocus our attention on safe operations.
- Because contractors make up a critical part of our workforce, we can only achieve safe operations when we work together. We will work closely with them and our contractor organizations to learn from their investigations, and to identify ways that we can partner better together, re-commit to our safety focus, and prevent this kind of tragedy in the future.
I want to reassure our employees, contractors and their families - as well as our neighbours and our partners - that we take these tragedies seriously. They are heart wrenching for us and our communities and devastating for families and friends.
Our value of safety above all else calls on us to have the courage to act so our workplace is healthy and safe. This is something that we all need to do together.
Mark Little
President & CEO
