Spotlight shines on Northern Interior log truck crashes

PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. — The Workers Compensation Board in BC says that fatalities involving log-truck drivers have moved from the Northern Interior backroads to the province’s highways.

Northern B.C. highways have been the site of six fatalities among truckers over the last year, Bruce Clark, WCB regional manager, tells the Prince George Citizen.

Union wants investigations into series of log truck deaths

Dwayne Steinbach, 41, is the latest fatality. He died last month when his logging truck crashed into a power pole last month. Another trucker was killed in a crash in January, while two others died in crashes at the end of 2004.

There could be more. A review of the WCB accident investigations by the Citizen showed the board investigated only three of six highway fatalities in north-central in any depth in the last four years.

Furthermore, few solutions aimed a preventing similar accidents are offered. The RCMP takes a lead role in investigating highway fatalities, but does not make recommendations. That job is up to the Coroner, who has made recommendations in only one of the highway accidents, the Citizen reports.

Recently, the United Steelworkers union — which represents thousands of sawmill workers in the Northern Interior — has been trying to organize log truckers. It has urged the B.C. government to implement mandatory inquests after each fatality in the forest sector.

In the past decade, there has not been an inquest into a log trucking death in northern British Columbia

— from the Prince George Citizen