Five employees sent to hospital following industrial incident at Fairview Terminal

A late morning incident at Fairview sent five workers to hospital and
resulted in the suspension of operations at the shipping terminal on the
city's west side.

See update at bottom of page:

Details still remain rather light on the events which led to the transportation of five workers from the Fairview Container Terminal to hospital on Wednesday morning, following an incident in what has been identified as a specific area of the container yard.

In a media release Angela Kirkham, DP World's Manager of Marketing and Communication confirmed the incident, which took place at 11:30 in the morning, with DP World advising that the four employees exhibiting signs of respiratory irritation, were first taken to the Port's first aid station before being transported to Prince Rupert Regional Hospital for further medical treatment, with DP World continuing to check on their well being.

To this point, the status of the employees and plans for Port operations have yet to be updated on the DP World information portal.

As part of DP World's emergency response to such situations, the operations at the Prince Rupert Terminal were suspended, and as a precaution all personnel were evacuated from the container yard.

DP World's incident command management team is working with emergency responders as part of the investigation into the source of the Wednesday incident.

It's not the first time that the company has suspended operations owing to industrial incidents, the most recent incident that required the suspension of operations took place in December of 2017 when  Butyl Acetate, a chemical used for synthetic food flavouring had resulted in respiratory issues for terminal workers.

You can find more items of interest related to DP World's Operations in Prince Rupert from our archive page here.

Update: 8:45 AM (July 12) -- The Province of British Columbia's Environmental Emergency Program provided a Thursday morning update to the Fairview incident, noting that the incident site had been re-assessed this morning and from that assessment the terminal was re-opened to operations at 8AM. The number of those requiring medical attention was also increased to five.

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