Innovation March-April 2023

F E A T U R E

Around 2016, ice production shifted to a facility in Kelowna, and the Kamloops facility was used for storage, distribution, and refurbishment of commercial ice coolers. Over the following six years, there was an extended disassembly process and throughout that time several changes were made to equipment and personnel. At no point was a licensed contractor directly engaged with the task of identifying or removing ammonia from the systems involved. Rather, managers at Arctic Glacier assumed it had been removed, partly due to staffing changes and misunderstood terminology, such as “decommissioning,” and “venting residual ammonia.” (The individuals who used those terms were very clear in post-incident interviews that ammonia had not been removed from the systems, said the report.) TSBC investigators spent months gathering evidence, piecing it together, and crafting a report with key findings and recommendations. Coleman said his team did a thorough job, noting he feels a responsibility to those who were affected. “It’s important to respect all the people who were involved. One family is missing a family member, and there are those who were affected by the exposure or the trauma of having witnessed it. It’s important to do the whole job and make sure that it’s done completely so that they can see that,” he said. While some of TSBC’s reports are highly technical, this one was written to be clear and actionable for those who don’t have an engineer’s

The parking lot in front of the building flooded following the purging of the system. P hoto : T echnical S afety BC

exponential possibilities.

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depth of technical expertise. “In this case, there was a lot of

management learnings, so we have to make sure we can explain that evidence for an audience that isn’t necessarily going to speak the same language that we do,” he said. “We have to really consider that.”

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