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| Vancouver 2010 passes on safety torch for future Olympics |
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The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) was a start-up employer in 2005. It would become a unique sort of employer, one that had a single purpose and would cease to exist once the job was done. It was in the process of forming a tight team of hard-working, keen people. In those early days, VANOC’s then-small organizing committee of about 50 people became aware, through the Olympic grapevine, of occupational injuries and fatalities in previous Games in other countries.
“Athens had had double digit deaths in the putting on of their Olympic games, which is something we really did not want to see happen in our Games,” says Donna Wilson, executive vice-president of workforce and sustainability at VANOC.
Committee members set out to create a worker health and safety program. For starters, they wanted to learn safety tips and lessons from past Olympics.
They found none.
“It was shocking to realize there was nothing there,” says Wilson. “We were looking for trends, statistics, and got a little bit from Sydney of 2000 but it was not complete. We were unable to find anything else.”
Meanwhile, two major construction projects were in the works. VANOC workers would build the Whistler Sliding Centre, as well as the Whistler Nordic Centre for cross-country skiing, ski jumping, biathlon and Nordic combined competitions.
A separate group, VANOC’s overlay department, would eventually erect the various temporary structures needed for the Olympics, including podiums, generators, scaffolding, camera platforms for the media, stages for the awarding of medals, trailers, thousands of metres of cable and fencing, hundreds of tents, as well as dining halls, warming areas and thousands of seats in temporary grandstands.
As on any grand-scale construction site, there would be hazards. Some people would work with cranes, electrical equipment, mobile equipment, or on scaffolds up to 200 feet high.
The Olympics also have office workers responsible for web development, public relations and other tasks. Their workstations and practices, too, must comply with health and safety regulations.
VANOC needed to minimize hazards and ensure adequate safety training for everyone — no exceptions. Management wanted to create a safety culture among its staff, contractors, subcontractors and volunteers. This workforce would come from varying work backgrounds, some from other jurisdictions with different safety laws and practices.
“We knew we needed to do something different to set ourselves up to potentially have the safest Games ever,” says Wilson.
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