There is an urgent need for new regulations to protect people obliged to go out to work in dangerous weather, the trade union Unite says.
The publication of the findings of a survey of Unite members on the issue was attended by Mark and Pamela Campbell, whose 24-year-old son Matthew, an electrician, died after being crushed by a falling tree while working in Slieve Gullion park, outside Newry, during Storm Ali in September 2018.
“Our day started as most other days do,” Mr Campbell told the Unite event in Dublin on on Thursday. “We were aware of the weather warning issued the day before: a yellow warning for high winds that was then upgraded to amber.”
A knock on the door that evening brought them news that “changed our lives forever and totally devastated our family”.
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Matthew had been working for a contractor at the Northern Ireland Water facility within the park, but the work was not urgent or storm-related, his father said.
“The work wasn’t urgent, it wasn’t because people’s electricity was down. He was just due to finish that day, due to go to another site the next day. The local council closed the park that day for members of the public, but not for contractors.”
Matthew, who was due to be married the following year, had been made redundant a few months earlier, so he was relatively new to the company.
Susan Fitzgerald, Unite’s regional secretary for Ireland, said the union’s research suggested many workers felt pressure to turn up for work even when they believed the commute or the work itself were fundamentally unsafe because of adverse weather.
“The legislation puts the onus very much on the individual to make an assessment, ‘Will I be safe here?’,” Ms Fitzgerald said.
She said there were cases of meat-plant workers who walked out during the Covid-19 pandemic to keep themselves safe who years later got tribunal rulings against them finding they “did not meet the threshold to assert the right to take themselves out of a dangerous situation”.
The union’s research suggested that, while many employers made accommodations to ensure staff safety during extreme weather, others required staff to be on site for longer than usual on these days.
Nearly half (48 per cent) of those who were required to attend work on site during Storm Éowyn a year ago reported not feeling safe for at least some of the time involved.
Ms Fitzgerald said Unite was seeking data on the number of weather event-related deaths and injuries in recent years.
She said the research highlighted many near-misses, with one member reporting a tree hitting their car without anyone being injured and another telling of an incident at a food production facility when part of a roof blew off, exposing asbestos.
“Everybody’s commenting on the timing of this launch,” she said, referencing the impact of Storm Chandra that was being widely felt this week. The Unite event was in the planning long before recent weather warnings, so the timing was coincidental. Some attendees arrived late because of the weather.
“Given the extent of the climate degradation we are seeing, there is always the chance there’s going to be some sort of weather event these days,” she said.
