“Be with me, Lord, throughout this day. Guide my hands and my saw. Let me see the dangers in time. Protect my crew and bring us all safely home to our families tonight. Amen.”

Decades ago, I heard a friend and logger – someone I have known for most of my time in the forest products industry – say this short prayer before leaving his truck to check on a crew in the woods. At that point in his career, Rick was spending much more time running multiple timber harvesting operations than cutting wood. However, his years on the ground – and the fact that his father and uncles and so many others had been loggers before him – had impressed upon him a keen understanding of the importance of safety in the woods, and the focus and attention needed to make sure his entire team went home safe every night.

I thought about Rick and this prayer as we observe National Safety Month. Obviously, safety needs to be an everyday part of all our work, so deeply embedded in our operations that it becomes second nature. June isn’t a month to be safe, but it’s good to take a month to remind ourselves how important a culture of safety is.

Ever since I started interacting with the Forest Resources Association in the mid-90s (it was then the American Pulpwood Association), providing safety resources for those in the woods and at the mill has been an important part of FRA’s mission and work. Cutting wood, transporting the product to mills, and processing fiber into material consumers want is dangerous work, and FRA has long provided resources, Safety Alerts, and training materials.

Safety Alerts allow members in the industry to learn from what has happened to others, providing a clear after-action assessment of the decision-making that led to a safety incident and actions that could have been taken to avoid a negative outcome (or, in some cases, appropriate treatment for an injury).

In order to support FRA members as they work to improve safety in their own companies or with those they count on for wood supply, we’ve assembled a page dedicated to past work on logging safety. This includes training publications and videos that can be ordered, and Safety Alerts addressing a range of logging safety incidents – felling, skidding, at the landing, and on the road.

FRA Logger Safety Resources

For FRA members, June is a good time to assess your organization’s safety resources and update them with new material if needed. This information is critical to everything we, as an industry, do, from regulatory compliance to 3rd-party certification to just getting home at night.

I encourage you to set aside some time this month to ensure that the safety information you have in your company – and the information you share with others in the supply chain – is up to date and as relevant as possible. By doing so, we can make the prayer Rick said in his truck an action item, and not just a request.