Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
This delivery van hit the rhubarb just before a talk about safe driving. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
ESTEVAN – Not long before the event started, some poor soul hit the rhubarb a block away from Estevan’s Southeast College, sliding into a snowy ditch in front of Conquest Equipment.
There could have been no better talking point for a safety stand down focusing on safe driving.
On Jan. 8 Independent Well Servicing, in partnership with Veren Energy, held its annual safety standdown at the college, with 165 people in attendance. IWS has been hosting these events each year for many years now, bringing in not only their own service rig crews, but crews of their competitors throughout the region who work with Veren (formerly Crescent Point Energy).
Brian Crossman of Independent Well Servicing made the the introduction. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
IWS partner Brian Crossman introduced Ryan Jacobson, CEO of the Saskatchewan Safety Council, noting, “Today’s topic is driving. In our line of work. It’s by far the most dangerous part of our day. By show of hands, who in this room has lost a family member, friend or co worker in a vehicle accident? Yeah, and it happens all the time.
“And it’s not just in the oil industry anymore. It’s actually gotten past asbestos as the leading cause of workplace injury. So I can speak for everyone this room, how it affects, you know, all of us adversely, your family, your friends and co-workers, seeing a little white delivery van down the street in the ditch on the way here today. So it’s it happens and all the time.”
Jacobson started out by saying he grew up in southern Saskatchewan, and dropped out of high school to work in oil and gas.
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He noted that the Saskatchewan Safety Council was the first organization anywhere in North America to create a universal Driver Education Program, which allowed Saskatchewan to become the first province to have universal driver education. They don’t do driver’s ed anymore, but they’re directly responsible for about 350,000 driving courses in the last decade.
“What I want to talk about is how we become safe Saskatchewan drivers. While I’ve talked all the way across this country, I can tell you, there’s bad drivers everywhere and there’s good drivers everywhere, and Saskatchewan isn’t any different. And for the most part, almost every single driver is a good driver, most of the time, but not all the time. So we’re going to talk a lot about where those differences lie, why driving is such an issue for you guys.”
Saskatchewan Safety Council CEO Ryan Jacobson, talking about safe driving. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
He said everyone knows the basics. “If we all know stop signs, means stop, and red lights means stop. Why are 50 per cent of our collisions at intersections where somebody fails to stop? That’s what I want to dig into. We know we’re supposed to stop, but why don’t we stop?”
He noted, “Saskatchewan Workers Compensation Board and labor relations team, together with WorkSafe to create a serious injury and fatality study and strategy and in that they recognize motor vehicle collisions right now in the workplace are the number one serious injury and fatality causing thing in our workplaces, in the province of Saskatchewan.”
Jacobson said, “We think of all the dangerous stuff we do, specifically in the oilfield, remember doing lots of, you know, high pressures, high risk stuff that we manage through policies, procedures, training, reinforcement, good supervision and having competent people like you people on site, doing the work, and yet our biggest risk is driving. And that sucks, but it’s one we can do something about. So let’s dig into that a little bit.
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“If you’re wondering, in Saskatchewan, in the decade, we’ve wiped out a small town. This isn’t just workplace. This is every driving fatality, but in that decade, we’ve had 287,000 collisions reported to SGI. Out of that, 1,235 fatalities. That’s more or less the population of Davidson. It is gone.”
He said he rarely comes across people who have not been affected in some way by a motor vehicle collision.
“For 1235 people, that was 1235 RCMP officers, or police officers, knocking at a door, doing a death notification. The number one stress-causing issue for an RCMP officer is having to do that notification to show up at a door, go, knock, knock, knock, and ‘I’m sorry to inform you,’ right? That’s 1235 families that had to start the phones going, the text messages, the phone calls to loved ones. Two in the morning, your phone rings. You know it’s not good.
“It’s 1235 funerals that had to be planned. Those are emergency response people that had to go to a scene. All of the stuff that every one of those statistics brings out is scary, and it hurts this province every single year. Brilliant people wiped out of existence because of the bad decision by somebody, not always their own.”
Impaired driving, distracted driving and speed are leading causes, he said.
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Bad times
On gravel roads, most of the collisions happen from April to September. He said there’s a lot more vehicles, from campers to farmers to people going to the lake. “We have to realize that a lot of that increase in traffic is coming from urban areas that doesn’t have any reason to be there normally, right? They don’t have the experience on gravel that we have.” Jacobson said.
Fatal crashes are up significantly on Thursdays and Sundays, p.m. “What that tells us is, it’s people going to the lake, it’s people going out for recreational. They leave a Thursday night, take a long weekend, they’re coming back Sunday night, and they’re getting into collision, typically between 2 and 10 p.m.”
Being tired can lead to mistakes, and fatal collisions.
He said it’s important to keep that in mind when planning workplace travel.
In 2023, 95 per cent of Saskatchewan drivers did not have an at-fault vehicle collision, meaning we’re actually pretty good drivers. “Most of us are very good drivers,” he said.
Safe driver
Jacobson said most people think they are an average or above average driver, something that’s clearly impossible.
He said, “A safe driver is one that has a vehicle that’s in well suited conditions for the conditions, or the environment, right? You need a vehicle that’s going to be stable under you. You need decent tires. You need decent lights, all those different things you have driving environmental factors. And I just talking about the snow and the weather. I’m talking about how many people are on the road.”
“Do you know what you’re supposed to do, and do you have the skills to actually do what you’re supposed to do? Because those are two very different things,” he said.
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The other factor is decision making.
“Do you know what you’re supposed to be doing? Are you capable of making the correct decision? And each one of these things plays into every single fatality investigation. Unfortunately, in my career, I’ve been involved in a number of fatality investigations. They all suck. I’m sure some of you may have been as well. There are horrible things to do, as you start trying to analyze what went wrong and second guessing everything on there. You know, was that tire, maybe a little bit too worn out? Was the environmental factors not accounted for correctly? What’s going on? Were they trained properly? Did they have the skills to enact on that training? What decisions did they make and what ramifications did those have? But if we can get those four things right, everybody goes home safe at the end of every night.”
Ryan Jacobson
Vehicle condition
He said, “The driver is always responsible for pulling that thing out of park. The moment you take it out of park, it’s your responsibility as a driver to know that it’s in the right condition to be able to drive. That’s why we all have logbooks, and we all fill out the pre-shifts every day before we’re going out, to be able to show that we did that stuff, we did our due diligence, we checked that vehicle over. And if it’s not then you have to make a decision as a driver whether you’re going to assume the risk, or whether you’re going to not assume the risk.”
Mirrors
Rear view mirrors are almost always positioned incorrectly. Jacobson said, “If you need to see that your doors are still attached to your vehicle, you’ve got bigger problems, right? That’s not what your mirror is for. Take your mirror, press the button, move it out so you can actually see beside your vehicle, in your blind spot where it’s supposed to be that right there would save off about 15% of most of our collisions, specifically those in lane changing, you know, merging, things like that, parking lots. It’s a very simple thing.
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Seatbelts
Last year one in five Saskatchewan traffic fatalities involved someone not wearing a seatbelt. “And the vast majority of those that involve seat belts were short duration trips on gravel and back roads,” he said.
“Turn your lights on,” he said. “Most of our vehicles have daytime running lights, head lights, not all of them, very few of them that have automatic tail lights.” And that’s a factor on days like that morning, where fog masks the rears of vehicles.
Knowing weather conditions are key. Highway Hotline is helpful.
Speed is almost always a factor in every single collision that causes serious injury, he noted, showing this video:
“We lose half of our speed in the last five meters that you’re breaking, which adds up significantly at different speeds.”
He explained why school zones are now 30 km/h.
“A vehicle that’s traveling at 32 kilometres an hour, statistically, there’s a five per cent chance of fatality if you hit somebody at that speed. This is why almost every school zone has been changing over the last decade to go to 30 kilometres an hour, from 40 or 50, depending where it was before, because our chance of a fatality, if you hit somebody is significantly lower. Because when you get up to 48 kilometres an hour, more or less 50 kilometres an hour, a typical urban street speed, right now we’re at 45 per cent risk of pedestrian fatality, so almost half. That’s a big jump for a few kilometres per hour.
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“That’s a big jump for a few kilometres an hour, and when we look at 64 kilometres an hour or jump to an 85 per cent risk of fatality.”
That’s right around the speed most people who get a ticket going through a school zone are pegged at, by the way.
If you’re tooling around in your one ton at 110 km/h, expect a very long stopping distance. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
Stopping distance
“Stopping distance is a combination of how long it takes you to react and how long it takes your vehicle to stop.”
He gave examples of typical stopping distances for small cars, but pointed out the parking lot was full of trucks. For a one ton truck going 110 km/h, the stopping distance is 144 metres. If you drive at 100 km/h per hour from Estevan to Regina, it only takes 11 minutes more, but your stopping distance is 21 metres less than if you were going 110.
“Speed is the number one factor that a driver has control of that will immediately impact your collision capability and immediately impact your fatality probability if you are in a collision,” he said.
Next in part 2, Jacobson talks about decision making.
Watch out for the upcoming Pipeline Online Grimes Sales & Service podcast, with the first episode schedule for 1 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 20.
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