Michael Chappell is the provincial coordinator of the Construction Health and Safety Program within the Ontario Ministry of Labour’s Occupational Health and Safety Branch. He is responsible for designing effective enforcement tools to ensure stakeholder compliance, protect the public interest and provide for worker safety.
Promoting consistency among a team of 156 inspectors across the province of Ontario and addressing local stakeholder issues can prove challenging. It requires an approach that is both responsive and flexible in order to address emerging safety concerns in a timely way.
In this presentation, Chappell will focus on recent concerns around crane safety in the wake of a number of major accidents, including those in New York State that claimed several lives. He will explain how a proactive enforcement initiative was used in Ontario to address crane safety, and how this flexible, hazard-based targeting system responded to an emerging concern to prevent accidents before they occurred.
Chappell will talk about the way this system evolved and what it says about traditional enforcement approaches. He will also discuss the evolution of new targeting approaches.