Oct 16, 2008. /Lesprom.com/. “We are targeting zero fatalities and serious accidents,” says NZ Forest Owners Association president Peter Berg, according to the Association. “An important part of that involves eliminating drugs and alcohol from the workplace. Data from similar industries both in New Zealand and overseas indicate that around 25% of safety-related incidents are caused by employees affected by drugs and/or alcohol, and it is reasonable to assume the same holds true for forestry.” The industry’s Drug & Alcohol Code of Practice was launched on Friday by forestry minister Jim Anderton at a function in Gisborne. It builds on a drug & alcohol toolkit that has been used successfully as a basis for drug & alcohol testing by some forest employers for eight years. “As a Code of Practice it sets standards that all forest employers need to comply with if they are to meet their legal obligation to provide their employees with a safe workplace,” Mr Berg says. “There is now a strong body of case law that supports – and indeed requires – employers to set up drug- and alcohol-free workplace programmes for anyone doing safety-sensitive work. That means everyone working in forestry has to be taking part, apart from those in purely administrative roles.” He says the Code is part of a comprehensive review by the association of all forestry operating procedures and standards, aimed at getting accidents and fatalities as close to zero as is humanly possible. Each year, four or five people are killed in the forest industry, down from around 10 a year a decade ago. This, says Berg, represents good progress relative to other industries – especially since the log harvest has increased by 20 per cent in that time. “Even so, having any level of fatalities is unacceptable,” Mr Berg says. “Also the rate of injury accidents – those serious enough to appear in ACC’s records – is remaining stubbornly high. What we want to see on the accident rate graph is a line that looks like a ski slope – downhill all the way.”