By Liz Carey
Bangor, ME (WorkersCompensation.com) – While logging accidents are down thanks to mechanization, a coming study hopes to find out if there are more illnesses in loggers due to the job’s increasingly sedentary nature.
Erika Scott, a researcher with the Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety in Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing, or NEC, will conduct a 5-year study to look at health and safety issues among Maine loggers.
Her interest in occupational safety stems from her experience losing a family member in a workplace accident.
“You should be able to go to work in the morning and come home in the evening no worse for wear,” she told the Bangor Daily News.
Scott said she will recruit 300 Maine loggers to participate in the study that will include a one-time physical and quarterly health surveys. The goal is to determine what health issues face loggers outside of fatalities and time-loss injuries, such as less serious accidents, physical trauma over time and chronic diseases related to logging.
As an industry, logging has the highest fatality rate of all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2016, loggers had a fatality rate of 135.9 deaths per 100,000 workers, more than 1.5 times the rate of the next nearest profession, fishing, with 86 deaths per 100,000. The national fatality ratio is just 3.6 deaths per 100,000 workers.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed 363 forestry and logging deaths between 2013 and 2016. Logging deaths in 2016 rose to 106, after a low of 81 in 2013. In Maine, according to the Bangor Daily News, 18 loggers have died because of work-related injuries between 2003 and 2016.
In an interview with WorkersCompensation.com, Danny Droctor, Executive Vice President with the American Loggers Council, said mechanization of the industry was a good thing.
"Fatalities are down because of mechanization, that's for sure," Dructor said. "I'd say that the industry is about 80 percent mechanized, if I had to guess. Our fatalities and injuries are down. Our insurance rates are going down. Anytime that you can use technology to protect people, it's a lot better for everyone."
Dana Doran, executive director of Professional Logging Contractors of Maine, told the Bangor Daily News that the mechanization of the logging industry was leading to an increase in the incidents of heart disease, diabetes, soft-tissue injuries and other conditions related to inactivity and reportative motion.
Doran said the study would provide valuable information about health and wellness issues in the industry for the future.
Dructor doesn’t think health issues related to a more sedentary lifestyle are limited to just logging.
“I think health issues because of sedentary lifestyle runs across all industries, not just the logging industry. It's the nature of our lifestyle now," he said.
Michael St. Peter, director of Certified Logging Professional, a Jackman, ME-based program that trains loggers in ways to protect themselves, said his program has helped reduce disabling logging injuries in that state.
According to the Maine Department of Labor, disabling injuries to loggers fell from 93 in 2012 to 67 in 2016.
St. Peter said that the lower rates of injury help not only loggers, but the industry as a whole by holding down the cost of workers’ compensation insurance.
