By Conrad McCallum

Still clueless after all these years.

What other assessment could describe the outlook of gas station employers in British Columbia? Those who were caught in violation of occupational health and safety legislation have been putting in place specific oh&s plans this season so that they could, you know, comply.

The best thing to say about the gas bars, 366 of which were hit during a WorkSafeBC inspection blitz last spring, is that most had some kind of oh&s plan. The worst may be that they were only generic plans or "dummies", and not jobsite-specific, which is kinda the whole point. The gas bars were ordered to draw up appropriate procedures, and inspectors have been checking to see that they have been implemented.

But written safety plans are only as good as the efforts to ensure properly trained workers actually follow them. With new jobsite conditions or staff, managers may be slow to review and adjust oh&s plans.

It has already been six months since the blitz, and more than a year and a half since the death of Grant De Patie, a Maple Ridge gas station attendant killed in a gas-and-dash robbery in March of 2005.

While the incident, and subsequent penalty, may have caused employers to sit up and take notice, if past experience is any guide, many of them will eventually fall back on the more "generic" approach to safety that got them in hot water in the first place, if they haven't already.

Six months is a long time in the gasoline service sector. And a long time for any number of industries facing an attention deficit with respect to safety, one of the by-products of high staff turnover. "Anywhere where they pay minimum wage, or around minimum wage, you're going to find that there's probably very little in the way of site-specific health and safety management," says Chris Praestegaard, a Calgary-based safety auditor.

WorkSafeBC found that gas stations had very little documentation to demonstrate that instruction, orientation and supervision had been satisfactorily performed.

But that's pretty typical in many industries, Praestegaard says. Mid-sized retail stores are also in the dark, as are most restaurant employers, including chains, he argues. The list goes on. Would a typical warehouse and distribution firm do site-specific planning? Don't even think about it. Security industry? Not going to happen.

Will many of these sectors continue to follow a generic or hand-me-down approach to safety planning? You betcha. Given the "burden" of training new staff all the time, head offices may figure they're better than nothing at all. And that may be true.

Still, it can get pretty bad. In a pinch, some managers draw up dummy or copycat health and safety plans based on their web "research" or information they got at a seminar. One employer went to a half-day presentation on health and safety management, Praestegaard reports, and the handout pamphlet became the company's health and safety program. Praestegaard says he's gone to sites which had completely different equipment listed in their health and safety manuals, because they'd simply got it from somewhere else.

The awareness heightened by high-profile events like the tragedy in Maple Ridge is difficult to sustain.

With every jobsite change, worksite plans slip further away from worksite realities. Over time, what might have been an adequate safety plan, at least on paper, has become rather generic. Meanwhile, new faces have entered the industry, while a high-profile event has faded from memory.

Then it will be time for the oh&s "dummies" to find their way back to the worksite once more.

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