The safety association for Canada’s oil and gas industry has released two guidelines designed to help the industry achieve safety at worksites by enhancing supervisors’ performance and successfully hiring and managing contractors.

Journalists from Canadian Occupational Safety magazine and CBC Radio in Thunder Bay, Ont. became the first recipients of the Industrial Accident Prevention Association’s new Russ Ramsay Media Awards for Excellence in Health and Safety Reporting. The award was presented by IAPA president and CEO Maureen Shaw at the opening ceremony of the Health and Safety Canada 2008 conference and trade show in Toronto this week.

Very quietly, oil and gas producers are breathing a sigh of relief and crossing their fingers. It may be a testament to the industry’s commitment to safety that difficult conditions — the need to keep up with new workers, new jobs, new activities, new technologies, and competing at a frenzied pace during a record “oil boom” —haven’t wrought havoc with the industry’s lost-time injury rate. Knock on wood.