June is National Safety Month and provides an excellent opportunity for the entire forest products industry to pause and reflect on how we incorporate safe practices and systems into our work and lives. Safety is such a part of the forest industry supply chain (and with good reason) that we sometimes forget to think about it. This isn’t the best perspective to have, and National Safety Month provides an opportunity to rethink our own individual approaches to safety.

For decades, FRA has been a leader in safety, producing resources and publications that can help your team and your suppliers develop and maintain a culture of workplace (and everywhere else) safety.

• FRA’s Safety Alerts are one of FRA’s signature publications – short, easy-to-digest summaries of incidents that have occurred on timber harvesting, trucking, and wood yard sites around the country. These provide a quick and straightforward way to learn about hazards particular to our industry, and – more importantly – how to avoid repeating mistakes that have been made.

• Our Technical Releases often contain information on safety tools or resources that can help make for a safer workplace. Take a look through the entire library, but recent Technical Releases on Defensive Driving, Dash Cam Safety Systems for Log Trucks, and satellite-linked communication devices for use in remote settings are a few examples.
• Our weekly Woods to Mill blog often addresses safety – directly or indirectly. For example, a post on a cable assist / tethered logging system being tried in the Appalachian Region shows how one company is seeking to make logging safer.
• Our friends and partners at the Timber Harvesting and Transportation Safety (THATS) Foundation have significant resources available to help understand, document, and improve safety. Make sure to see their website at http://loggingsafety.com/.

Safety is critical to everything we do – in the woods, on the road, and at the mill. National Safety Month provides us an opportunity to remember how important culture, attitude, and the practice of safety is for our health, and that of our co-workers. The National Safety Council – an organization that works to promote safety in the workplace, on the road, and in the home – has a pledge that you can take. It is simple, and I invite you to recommit to safety – for June and beyond.

I pledge to:

• Never compromise my own safety or the safety of my co-workers to get the job done.
• Actively look for hazards, promptly report them and take appropriate action to warn others.
• Be a good safety role model for my friends and family, even when off the job.

This blog was originally published June 11, 2020, and is as relevant today as when it was first shared.