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Over my Head's Connecting to the Ocean season was made possible with support from the Ocean Frontier Institute, module I and Memorial University.

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Well, I'm in over my head, no one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over head. What do I need? Tryin' save the planet oh will someone please save me? Tryin' to save the planet oh will someone please save me?

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Welcome to In Over My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. Well, connecting to the ocean and exploring small-scale fisheries and governance. I want to learn more about safety, legal protection and risk prevention. This is connecting to the ocean. Part four, safety and order. What's your connection to the ocean?

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My connection to the ocean I would say is mostly as an open-water swimmer. I've done the longest open water swim that I've done is a 16 kilometer swim around the island of Perhentian, Perhentian Besar, which is the larger of the two Perhentian islands. So I spend a lot of time in the water training. Of course, I can train in the pool, but the best way to simulate and train for open water swimming is actually in the ocean. So when I get the chance and the opportunity you'll find me in the ocean.

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My first conversation had me learning about safety risks in the fisheries.

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So my name's Barb Neis. I'm an honorary research professor here at Memorial University. My background is in sociology, but I've done a lot of interdisciplinary work over the last few decades, mostly focused on fisheries and marine and coastal communities.

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When we're looking at the fisheries and fish harvesting, what sort of safety concerns are there?

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Well, why don't we just take a step back from that, because everybody always goes to fishing, but actually I got involved initially around seafood processing, you know, which is where most of the women were, you know, and they tend to be really lowly paid. And of course, more and more of them are now temporary or international migrant workers, right? So the types of safety issues you see there are really significant, right? I would say ergonomics is a big one. You know, repetitive work, lifting, standing, and a high-pressure type of work, particularly in the almost exclusively seasonal fisheries that we have now. And so, like, I'm looking at the crab fishery this year and, you know, it was seven weeks delay because there was a strike over the low prices. So they are processing with the same number of workers, basically between 10 and 12 million pounds a week of snow crab, right?

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That's a lot of product, you know. So you've got workers, many of whom, again, the international migrant workers wouldn't have worked in the industry before unless they would have been coming here for several years. Relatively new work. But even seasonal workers are off. And then bang, they're into it and they are into it intensively. You just go from zero to massive seven days a week, long shifts and very physically demanding work. That's sort of where I started. But then I did quite a lot of work on respiratory problems that have to do with crab processing, what they call crab asthma, occupational asthma to snow crab. When they process cook process, clean the crab, it aerosolizes proteins, and then they get breathed in and you get skin contact and so on. And a certain proportion of the labour force eventually gets sensitized to those proteins.

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They'll develop skin problems asthmas for the most part, and they can get progressively worse. So that's a pretty serious occupational illness. And the thing was, the research that had been done already in Quebec in the eighties had shown that if you kept working at this once you were sensitized, there was a real risk that you developed chronic asthma. Initially. You just go to your doctor, get all your puffers and everything in the spring so you don't lose time at work, and you go through the season, then you put 'em in the cupboard, and then you go back the next year. But a certain proportion of people, you know, they could hardly walk from the plant to the lunchroom, or they can't play hockey, they can't do exercise, they can't paint their houses, they can't, right. It really was very, very serious for some people. And they would be doing things like going to the hospital to be on oxygen so they could go back to work. And so this, all of this was going on, right? But nobody was really doing anything about the healthcare system wasn't doing anything. They were just treating people. So that's how I really got involved in marine and coastal health and safety stuff. And then we did a big project on fishing safety. And then another one as well.

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I asked Barb about the role of governance and safety.

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So the governance issues, which is what we're looking at more now. But we've always looked at governance because the thing is, how do you know what the hazards are? You need good statistics, you need to break them down. You need to know cause of accident, you need to, you know, have access to the industry to figure all of that out. And so if the governance system doesn't give you those statistics, it tends to keep things invisible. And then you need, you know, a good opportunities to get on board and a whole body of people whose job it is in some sense to pay attention to. How do you, when you've got, you know, 4,000 vessels spread across the coast, all fishing, different fisheries using different gear out at different times of the year and your health and safety capacity is basically on shore, doesn't have a boat, .

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I mean, unless somebody dies, you know, then Transport Canada or the Transportation Safety Board will come in if a boat disappears and they'll do an investigation. But for the most part, there isn't much in the governance structure around prevention, or there wasn't then it's better now. I mean, now we have the newfound Labrador Fish Harvesting Safety Association, and it's played an important role in terms of training, identifying hazards working with researchers. They're really important players now. And I hope that they will survive. Right? I hope that that safety association will continue to be funded because they're very, very important. And it was them that we did this paper on the COVID pandemic. They played such a critical role in a way, it was kind of fortuitous that the executive director of the Newfoundland Labrador Fish Harvesting Safety Association, so she has an advisory board, and she works very closely with the union, and she was a nurse, so she knew public health, and she knew as soon as she started to see stuff, what this could be.

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And so she was able to sit down with the union and say, look, this is coming. It starts in March, so they're about to open the inshore fishery so you can have all these people going fishing on small boats. What are you gonna do? How can you have a fishery? I mean, everything shuts down, right? They don't know much about this and how it's spread and so on and so forth. You know, the, the companies just wanted them to go fishing. You know, the plants, they wanted the plants up and running. They wanted because, you know, this season had to start on time. The union also represents the plant workers, and they were very concerned about plant worker health as well. And they saw it from the beginning as an occupational health threat, which it wasn't seen as an occupational health threat in many parts of Canada, even though it clearly was.

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So they worked really hard and had access to ensure councils and so on. So they could very easily communicate and discuss with the fish harvesters in particular, but also with the processing workers, different ideas for how you would fish safely in the context of uncertainty and fear. The other thing is fear. These are mobile, you know, it's like truckers, right? So the fish harvesters are moving from community to community. There's worry they're gonna spread the disease or that people are gonna go onto their boats and make them sick, right? So they came up with a, you know, the best practices kind of protocol that was reasonable, that they thought was doable. And because of that, the season was allowed to go ahead, otherwise they would've lost an entire season. So it was, it's really interesting, you know, so from a governance perspective, right? It was that kind of capacity to rapidly mobilize.

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The knowledge was there, the leadership was there, the people were there at the table, and they were able to, in a way, solve a problem. And there, as far as I know, there were no outbreaks. There were no real problems. Now the thing is that the shutdown of the province probably helped a lot, right? Because once they shut everything down, they didn't let people in and out of the province. If there'd been a whole lot of people coming and going, I think it would've been tougher. But I, I don't think it's just pandemics, I think really effective governance in terms of fishing safety without an active joint health and safety committee, right? That involves the workers, you know, where they, they have a voice and so you, they can bring to management and there's a forum to sort it out, hazards that they've identified.

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But with fishing, small-scale fishing, it's just so dispersed, right? So if you didn't have a union, you didn't have that kind of organizational structure. And then the expertise is, the expertise was so critical. And again, it's like, is that gonna work? Is it not gonna work? You know, we need an opportunity to have this conversation with people, because what you'll get otherwise is a cookie cutter, you know, imposition of a particular solution. You know, a good example of that is stability. So Transport Canada really wants stability testing for all of the fishing vessels. It's very expensive. There's not enough people around to do it. So for the, almost inevitably, it's been very slow to bring that into the small-scale sector. And it's not clear that it makes much difference, but what the Fish Harvesting Safety Association said, but yeah, you might have a boat that's stable at the dock, but you know, the critical thing is that you know your boat, because things you do on the boat can affect stability, right?

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So you stack it, you put a whole bunch of lobster pots too high, or you do this or you do that, that changes the stability of your vessel. So simply having stability testing for vessels is not in and of itself going to stop vessels from capsizing. You have to have a knowledgeable skipper and knowledgeable crew, and they need to understand that what they're doing is affecting what they call this dynamic stability of the vessel. So, you know, again, this sort of top-down regulatory approach that you've used for great big boats, and you wanna use it for little boats, isn't adequate. It's just not an effective, in and of itself. It's not an effective solution. And it might just turn people off the whole fleet, the fishing fleet, particularly the 65 footers, 45 to 65 footers are not particularly good vessels. And that has to do with fisheries management policies.

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They weren't allowed to make their vessels as long as they wanted because of the cod moratorium. And, you know, they thought, well, there's problems with excess capacity and they're gonna make their boats bigger, and then we'll have more capacity. So we're gonna limit the vessel length. So what do they do? You have big boats that are wider, deeper, you know, they're boxes, they're less fuel efficient, and they're actually less stable. So that's the whole area of how fisheries management can have significant health and safety consequences. You know, we can see it again in those snow crab fishery right now, the companies have imposed trip limits on boats. So you're only allowed to go once a week, and you're only allowed to land so much crab. You have so much crab quota and your day comes up and you have a small boat and it's bad weather, so then you lose your place in the queue. Well, that's an incentive to go fishing in bad weather, there's no question. So, you know, how can you fix that problem? Right? That problem needs to be fixed.

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Yeah. No, yeah. It seems like it's like you mentioned those kind of cookie-cutter solutions or, or not involving the fish harvesters. And, and, and to me, it sounds like there's a lot of demands from the industry itself, right? Just to produce and to work. And, and it seems like the fish harvesters at least, and maybe the plants, you know, they, they just are, are forced to maybe cut corners or, or be less safe in order to just, you know, make a living, right?

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Yeah. Well, I mean, in the case of the plant workers, I mean ideally from their point of view, you would be spreading out your catch, right? And this is the, the advantage of having a small scale fishery and owner operated vessels is that they, you know, we don't, we don't empty out our rural communities, you know, they don't even necessarily have to land what they harvest. They can ship it directly to market. It's done on factory freezer trawler. So it's sustained rural communities in all kinds of critical ways. But the downside is that, you know, you end up with either no trip limits. So I mean, you, you get this boom-bust, but even with the trip limits, obviously, we're still getting this boom-bust, which is physically for plant workers, very hard to handle. So the question is, there are dilemmas everywhere, but often safety is an afterthought.

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And I think particularly when you're dealing with something that is progressive, you know, they, people stand up and notice when a boat sinks, right? But somebody an old aging labor force that it actually can hardly move their arm, right. Or their back or whatever, you know, is that aging? Is that, you know, is that the job? And the same was true of crab asthma. It was a gradual onset. Some people smoked, oh, is it smoking? Is it aging? Is it, and you know, you don't have healthcare professionals who even know about it, right? Who would know how to diagnose it. They just give them puffers.

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Yeah. And, and, and when you're interviewing some of these fish harvesters, was there kind of a sense of like toughness or like they just, they power through it kind of thing?

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Like is there kind of that well, yeah, I mean that, you know, that that's the whole thing. The reason why fishing is dangerous is because of machismo, right? This whole male culture, toxic male culture to some degree. I think there's probably an element of that there. If you're asking about injuries, you have to ask carefully, because half the time I'll say, oh, no, I haven't had any. Well, I mean, I lost my finger, you know, I broke my arm. I, but it is like, injury isn't a normalized, in a sense, part of the occupation, loss of hearing, very normalized. So it's an element. The thing is, you know, I've always thought about this way, you know, a fish harvester is standing on the deck of a boat, boat in a changing dynamic ocean environment, doing something this week and maybe something quite different the next week. Are you gonna go and tell them, you know, you have to do it this way, or you have to, you know, it's just so complex.

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You know, my colleague Nicole Power said, well, let's go and ask them how they keep themselves safe. Because what you tend to get is a kind of they're the problem individualized treatment, and that really negates the knowledge that they have, right? The research I've read has participatory approaches to fishing safety are the best way to go. So the question is, how do you do that? You know, and they learn, they may think something is safe, but if, if you tell them to do it this way, but you don't really know much about fishing, let's face it, right? How many people who do health and safety actually know how to fish, right? Actually understand the dynamic environment people are working in. So it really makes sense to start with an assets-based approach. What do you do to keep yourself safe? You know, the simple question, what do you do with a rope? Because if you get caught in that rope, you are gone, right? So how do you manage rope? You know, and then you could work with them around, well, how could you manage it better or more safely? Or, and that might take a redesign of the deck and that might take a different shape boat. And then you start running into fisheries management regulations and so on. You could understand why fishermen might get kind of off about certain kinds of regulations.

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Was there anything else you wanted to cover, Barb, on safety and the research you're doing that we haven't covered that you think is important to talk about?

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Health and safety research in general is massively under-supported in Canada. I would say, look, you know, most people spend like eight hours a day, 10 hours a day of their lives at work. Like if we're trying to understand health and health determinants, you know, and what's causing chronic and other types of problems to not pay attention to the role of work is foolish, right? It's just makes no sense. And the high-risk maritime work is risky work, right? It is. The second thing is, in a community loss of a fishing boat is massive, right? I mean, that's could be an entire family, you know, all the men and, or men and women in a working-age family, and they would have connections right across that community and, and so on. I can remember Jim Wellman, he used to, he ran the fisheries Broadcast for a long time, and he, we had a conference on where we were talking about fishing safety.

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And he stood up and he talked about, 'cause he's done these books called Last Voyages, about vessels that sank. And he, you know, he just pleaded for somebody to do research on PTSD among fish harvesters because he just saw it over and over and over again. They'd lost somebody overboard. Again, it's a close family member. They're carrying the, the sort of grief and guilt and the fear and all of that stuff with them all the time. And there's no resources in these communities for something like that. And it isn't even recognized. There's not much out there on it.

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Yeah, it seems like it's kind of the same problem we've been discussing where it's maybe a lack of forethought and you're, you don't have enough people focusing in on that, right?

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Yeah. But also, again, in an expert-driven model, then you need a whole bunch of experts. In a participatory model, you acknowledge from the beginning that there's a lot of expertise there. The question is, so what's the place for certain kinds of training and expertise and continuity and, you know, what are the organizational structures that you would need? And, you know, and the, you know, the Coast Guard Auxiliary is all fishing boats, right? They are the people who do a lot of the rescues. You know, if you were trying to do search and rescue without the Coast Guard Auxiliary, it wouldn't make any sense. So start there, start with that kind of structure. And I, I think that is what the Safety Association is trying to do. It just needs more resources and it needs to be understood as critically important.

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Next, I would chat about the weather and why it matters to fish harvesters.

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I'm Joel Finnis. I am a climatologist currently working with Memorial University's Department of Geography.

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So you are part of the submodule of informing governance responses in a changing ocean called marine safety, and that has to do with weather, right? So maybe tell me a bit about that sub-module.

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Yeah, so that the weather bit is really where I came in before this project. I had been introduced to the original lead of this piece, Dr. Barb Neis and sociology, who was starting to have some conversations about safety and weather. Her field is, is safety, right? She's been working in marine safety for decades, and she'd started to engage a little bit more with weather as a risk factor. And that cracked open a lot of discussions between her and I where I would share some information about, say, for example, how a weather forecast gets produced and how forecasters think about this kind of information. And her response would be, wait, that's how that gets produced. That's what that is. And she'd talked to me about how fish harvesters would use weather information, and I'd say, wait, wait a second. That's what they're doing with this. And so we'd realized that there were a lot of assumptions about the forecasting world and the end user, specifically fisheries end users, that neither of us understood individually. But when we started having discussions, I mean, it really sparked a lot of research ideas. And so that led to an early research collaboration that then spun into this.

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So from your side of things, yeah. How does a meteorologist, right? Mm-Hmm, , how does a meteorologist create a, you know, a, a weather, I don't know all the terminology, but , how do they predict the weather?

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How do they make a forecast?

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Yeah. How do they make, how does a meteorologist make the forecast?

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I mean, when you think about the marine forecast, it's in Canada, the, the traditional product, the core product is the marine forecast from Environment Canada, or Environment and Climate Change Canada now, right? And that's a very simplified, generalized description of what you're going to expect for a massive area over the next couple of days, right? And there's even more limited information about what you'd see like three to five days after that. So if that's all you see and that's all you're looking at, then you won't really be aware of all of the processes and information and expertise that goes into producing that, right? You just get something that says, you know, it could be cloudy, or there's a, there's a high wave warning for this location from this time to this time. But ultimately what that is, this is distillation of multiple models telling us what we could see into the future, interpreted by multiple meteorologists, all in discussion with one another, both between shifts and mid-shift particularly when we're starting to approach a high-impact event, right?

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More people will become involved, more people will be weighing in, and the goal there is to get the most important information into the hands of the people who will be ma able to make decisions around it, right? The problem is, though, that in today's environment, meteorologists very rarely have a chance to actually see what decisions get made. They're trying to anticipate user needs. They're trying to think about how this might get used. They're trying to anticipate what impacts might occur, and they'd like to get that out. But then, you know, they're never gonna hear back from the end user. That's not necessarily new, but it's definitely amplified since forecast offices has have moved towards, I'd describe as more automation and more online delivery, and less in terms of the human-to-human interactions, right? So once in Canada, there were things like information lines that were heavily advertised and quite frequently used.

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So if you were a, if you were a fish harvester, if you were somebody working in fisheries and you were trying to anticipate what the weather was gonna be like, or he had questions about what the forecast was discussing, you could call up this line and say, Hey, you know, what are we gonna see in this area where I'm gonna be? And the forecast would have a discussion with you, right? That phone line is still in existence, but it briefly went to a pay-for-use model, which of course means that a lot of people said, well, I'm not gonna do this anymore. The use dropped off more people started relying on online delivery tools anyway, so that phone line quietly became non-pay, like free for use again. But of course, people didn't come back to it, and it hasn't been heavily advertised the way that it, it once had. So yeah, you've got these isolated meteorologists who are thinking about all this information and talking to their colleagues and delivering this stuff and hoping that it helps somebody, but are a little bit frustrated with the fact that they don't know who's using it and for what, right?

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Mm-Hmm, . Yeah. That's really interesting. I didn't know about that phone line. And so you said there's a, a, you know, a disconnect between the forecasters and the fish harvesters. And so is some of your research that you're working on now trying to connect those two?

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So we've spent a lot of time taking a look at how forecasters think about the marine forecasting process, and then a lot of work as well, taking a look at how fisheries made use of those, right? So we, we got a better understanding of what the decision-making process is within those, those fisheries. And what was useful about that research is that we really came to understand a lot of anxieties that marine meteorologists have about how their information might get used, or how people might be using what I, I wouldn't necessarily call them competing products, but other sources of weather information were perhaps a little bit unfounded or unwarranted is maybe a better word, right? So for example, if I talked to meteorologists, they were a few years ago, rather concerned about the proliferation of these, these online weather model visualization tools, things that you can find in places like windy.com or Wayfinder, there's, there's all kinds of these tools that are just meant to help you see weather models.

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So you can basically pick out a point and say, well, what does the weather model say is gonna happen at this location? The caveat that all the meteorologists have is that that is one model visualization, and the visualization is probably distorting the resolution of the model. So you get a sense that there's, there's more precise information here and that it can distinguish between say, a location and another point that's just 10 kilometers away. And it might give you different, different answers. That's not what the model's doing, that's just interpolation between two data points, but it gives the idea that you've got more precision than actually exists. And people were very concerned that they'd ignore the broader marine forecast coming from Environment Canada, which would highlight these risks and would just take a look at an online visualization tool that would tell them what they wanted to hear, right?

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If they can point to a location, say, well, it's gonna be fine here, I'm gonna go out, they might miss the fact that another dozen model runs say it's not gonna be safe for you to be out there. Ultimately, , when we take a look at how this stuff gets used though, it really aligns well with what the meteorologists say the thing should be used for and how it should be implemented, right? So if I talk to a fish harvester, they might say, oh, you know, I, I like windy. That's what I pay attention to. That's the thing I go to the most. When you ask them what they actually do that they say, well, you know, I take a look at the Environment Canada forecast and get a sense of what I should be looking for, and then I go to something like windy and I'll figure out what time those problems are supposed to arrive and whether they're gonna be in the areas that I'm, I'm supposed to be in, or whether they're gonna be off in this other region of this massive forecast zone.

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And if it's not gonna impact me, maybe I'll, I'll still go out, or alternately, if it's supposed to pass by before I start doing the dangerous activity of phishing, I might do the safer activity of getting out to my ground to just wait to see if it actually clears up the way the model says it will. And if it does, we'll go ahead. And that's more or less how the, the meteorologist meteorologist would say this should be used, right? It's for adding additional context and maybe a little bit of timing to some of those broader interpretations that you see in that big high-level environment Canada watch out for this type of forecast.

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And with those forecasts, is there a certain amount of interpretation that the fish harvester has to do when they're reading it?

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Absolutely. And they're interpreting across multiple resources, right? So they're not taking a look at just one app. They're not taking a look at just one forecast. They're taking a look at a bunch of different information for often very wide geographic areas, right? So they might have to go through several forecast zones before they get to their fishing grounds. And so they'll be looking at multiple forecasts from multiple locations, from many, many sources. And it's not like they're even interpreting that on their own, right? They'll be talking to their colleagues, people on their vessels, they'll be talking to people on other vessels, they'll be trying to get a sense of what other people think about this weather. So it's not even an individual decision, right? It's ultimately a collective choice. Now, there is also sort of this, this tendency for fish harvesters to sort of take a look at what they expect the weather will, will look like.

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And as soon as one vessel says, well, I've decided based on our conversations and all this that I'm going out, there's a higher chance that other vessels are gonna follow, right? But in the same way, as soon as one vessel says, look, I've decided this is too dangerous, other people will also say, okay, well they're not going out. Probably, I shouldn't either. So ultimately, a lot of that decision-making is done in the interest of safety, right? It's not as cavalier or cowboy-ish as I think even many of the fish harvesters will initially describe it, right? If I talk to them in an interview and ask them, okay, what about weather and how do you use it? And what do you think about the forecast? I'll often get a lot of like grumbling. Well, you know, they're never right anyway. But if you then say, well, so do you just ignore it? They're like, God, I'd never ignore it. No, not at all. No, you pay attention to it. You're always watching it. The, the way they phrase it is, you, you have to make your own forecast, which means I've gotta take all this information and put it together and make a decision on my own, which, you know, frankly is, is the way I think a lot of this information ideally should be used, right?

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So when talking about weather and safety, what are some risks that weather can bring to fishing and fish harvesters?

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The problem is that even when the weather's perfect, fishing is not a safe occupation, right? I mean, this is, this is a moving platform in a changeable environment. Everything off of your boat is potentially risky, right? So yeah, the chance of injury of slips trips of, of falling into the water, they exist anyway. But as soon as you start throwing in some rough seas, as soon as you start throwing in some high winds, colder temperatures, et cetera, then the risks start going up, right? You can face anything from high sea swells that make it impossible to actually get out on deck and do any kind of work to icing events where you've just got fine spray from the ocean that is supercooled and snap-freezing onto the halls of the ships, making them basically a, a floating skating rink, right? They also pose risks to the vessels themselves. So, you know, you gotta worry about the whole thing, capsizing, not just you being knocked around on this thing. If you take a look at most incident reports in fisheries, and there's a lot of them, right? I mean, it's the most dangerous occupation in Canada, if not the world. If you take a look at the incident reports, they'll often cite that weather is a factor. They might not get specific about what the weather was, but in every single case, weather of some kind is playing a role.

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I guess, you know, in the context of a changing climate and possibly changing weather, if there are more, you know, like you said, high-impact events, would that impact the fishing industry?

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I mean, certainly more bad weather is gonna translate to greater risk in fisheries, right? I think a bigger problem though could be maybe not even a bigger problem, but a different problem that could be just as big or bigger is the changes in the timings of events, right? So it might not even be that you get more storms, but if, for example, oceans are warmer earlier and later than they were before, then that can shift when we see, and where we see some of these, these major storms passing by, whether that's a, a heavy winter storm or a even something like a, a post-tropical transition. I shouldn't say post-tropical transition, I should call them a hurricane, because frankly, they're old hurricanes, they're retired hurricanes, they aren't technically hurricanes anymore because they're not getting energy the same way they used to when they come to Canada. So we call them post-tropical transitions, which I think sometimes makes people think, well, it's after tropical, so I don't have to worry about it.

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Yeah, it doesn't sound as serious.

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It's not though, right? It's, it's, it's, it's still an incredibly dangerous system, and in many ways it's more dangerous than it was when it was a, a low-level hurricane, right? A category one hurricane. When you've got a post-tropical transition that is category one or category two wind speeds, it does a couple of things. That system moves much faster than it did when it was a hurricane, which means you've got less time to get out of the way, and they also tend to get stretched out, so they end up taking up more space and affecting a larger area. So, so, you know, as we start to see ocean temperatures change, we can see timing in when we expect these storms to occur can start to shift, and the locations that they show up in can start to shift as well. And so you might find that you are used to dealing or fishing at certain times of year when you never have to worry about these things, and now you do, right?

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So new hazards because of shifts in climate change, but you'll also see that fish species may start to move and may start to proliferate in new locations, which means that you might find yourself following the fish to areas in which you didn't use to fish that have different climates, different hazards, different risks. And I, I do wanna stress that response opportunities are important to think about here too, right? If you are fishing off the coast of, of Newfoundland, you've got search and rescue opportunities around Newfoundland and also nearby in Nova Scotia, right? So, so you can, you can respond relatively quickly as you move into the Labrador Sea. There's much less in the way of search and rescue resources that are are existing there. The amount of time it takes for somebody to get to you if an incident occurs can go up.

(00:33:50):
So it's not even that you're, you're necessarily facing a more extreme hazard. It's just that when an incident occurs, your chance of it becoming a severe incident because you can't get help quickly goes way up. We talked a little bit before about the disconnect between some of the forecasters and the end users. I'll stress that the meteorologists don't love this. They'd much rather have more frequent connections with end users, and when those connections occur fish harvesters themselves are overwhelmingly in favour of them. So when we started having discussions with forecasters and end users here in Newfoundland, it was, we, we had some very general discussions about how forecasts get used and, and you know, how they connect with, with forecasters. And the answer was not really very often, but we shifted and had comparable discussions with people in Nova Scotia.

(00:34:42):
This one particular forecast opportunity kept showing up, and it was around the lobster fishery. So what happens in the lobster fishery in, in Atlantic Canada as a whole is that you've got these defined lobster fishing areas that somebody has a license for, and if you have a license for that zone, then you've got a particular season that opens up when the season starts, all these vessels rush out. They're loaded with traps and, in fact, often overloaded. They've got the heaviest weight they're gonna carry all season. They've gotta get out to their preferred fishing grounds and drop these traps. Because once you've dropped a trap, you're basically claiming that particular location for as long as the season lasts or you decide to move your traps. So if you know that there's better catches in particular locations, then you're gonna rush out to try to beat the competition to claim some of that territory before it all gets picked up.

(00:35:33):
A few decades ago, opening day meant, regardless of what the weather was, you were going out, you were gonna take that risk, the weather had to be absolutely atrocious, and nobody else would be going out for you to decide, I'm not gonna compete with this. Which inevitably led to a lot of weather-driven incidents. If the weather was even slightly bad, you'd end up with multiple emergency calls within a few hours of everybody leaving port. The solution was to have port authorities and fisheries representatives collectively decide whether weather was bad enough to warrant a delay. And so they'll have a conference call 24 hours before the posted open date, they'll have a discussion about what the forecast is, and then they will make a decision about, you know, whether to go ahead. Almost always, that decision is made in the interests of safety in the last few years.

(00:36:25):
They've started those calls by inviting an Environment Canada meteorologist to talk to 'em about the weather. So they're not just looking at the weather forecast and interpreting for themselves. They have this expert come in who is gonna say, well, this is why we, we put this in the forecast. This is what we think is gonna happen. This is what time we expect it's going to occur. And then all of these fisheries representatives and port representatives will start asking questions, right? Well, you know, this, this model I was looking at said that this was gonna be happening. Why are you saying this is gonna happen? And the meteorologist would have a chance to respond to all of that. And so the fisheries reps end up learning a lot about how the forecast ends up being built and what else is hidden inside of that forecast. They don't necessarily see explicitly on the meteorologist's end, they actually get to sit around for the rest of that call if they'd like to, and see how the decision gets made and see what decision gets made.

(00:37:15):
It's, it's an incredibly rare thing for a meteorologist to say, this is the forecast I gave, and now I know how it's being used. And so they value it a lot. The meteorologists do. And if I talk to the fish harvesters, they overwhelmingly support the presence of that meteorologist as well. And in fact, we had a number of them say, well, this should be done in every fishery. And frankly, not every fisheries run the same way. And so maybe there's not the same clear decision point where a meteorologist might be valuable, but just the fact that people are open to inviting them in is exciting for Environment Canada meteorologists who would like to have more of those contacts.

(00:37:47):
Mm-Hmm, . Nice. No, that sounds really productive. So do you think that there's gonna be more of those connections happening in the future?

(00:37:53):
I mean, I hope so. I think that that's, that's something meteorologists would like to see. They want more connection, but I think the other thing that they really value there and that I see as value is that these kinds of interactions really showcase what meteorologists do. As with so many other things, Michael, there's this push towards automation, right? We can just have computers that will interpret all this, this weather data, and they will just spit out a best practices AI automated forecast for every single location that we would wanna look at. The value of the human element in here is that after seeing model runs for the same location again and again, they understand some of the inherent biases in those models. They will be able to correct for some of them. And we see this in the case of, of major events.

(00:38:42):
They'll be taking a look at not just the models that are being produced in Canada, but weather models being produced in Europe and the US and basically anywhere where they can this get this information. And they will constantly be comparing our native models to those other centre's models. In the case of Hurricane Dorian, this was incredibly valuable. They were taking a look at Canada's weather models and, this happens all the time with that particular storm. Other models, I think it was, it was from Europe, were just tracking it a little bit better. So when they compared what the models thought was gonna happen to what actually occurred on an hour by hour or six hourly basis, they were seeing that these other centers models were just capturing this particular system better. And so they were able to say, well, okay, we're not gonna pay attention to Canada's models right now.

(00:39:26):
We're gonna shift to the ones that are performing better. And there'll be other times when other centers across the world will be saying, well, we're ditching our models, we're going with the Canadian one, it's doing better. And they'll start to emphasize that kind of thing. And it's harder for automated systems to really catch those nuances sometimes and respond accordingly. And so yes, you actually get to see the value of the forecaster and practice, which again is something that, that meteorologists love because I think a lot of them are feeling a little undervalued these days.

(00:39:54):
Lastly, I would learn about legal protection and risk prevention.

(00:39:58):
My name is Desai Shan. I'm an assistant professor in occupational health and safety Division of Community Health and Humanities faculty of Medicine Memorial University. So I'm a social legal researcher. My research expertise is mainly focusing on the occupational health and safety, legal protection available for people engaged in fishing industry

(00:40:20):
With safety risks. What sort of safety concerns are there with people who are working in fisheries or aquaculture?

(00:40:28):
Well, this is a wide range of occupational health and safety hazards. But more broadly speaking, we have the prevention and protection branches. So for prevention, we're trying to avoid accidents as much as we can for the protection is if the accidents, injuries units occurred, we should make sure there is a sufficient resources for our people working in the fishing industry to get covered. So this is basically two branches. So for the prevention side, I'm working on the noise exposure and hearing loss. So for that part, basically we all kind of, if we have experience working in this industry, we know that the noise level could be extremely high on the fishing vessels and with the long exposure to those noise, and sometimes, let's say we could recommend personal protective equipment, but yearly from a safety perspective, really the last resort. So actually there are more efforts shown to be made at the eliminate and the control level rather than to say, just encourage individuals to use personal protective equipment such as the hearing protector.

(00:41:37):
And one of our research basically showing that it's not easy for the fish harvesters to use the hearing protector. The reason is because even though to protect their hearing, protecting hearing is kind of a priority, but they also need to ensure their safety operation. They need to maintain critical communication with each other and the current equipment, not that user-friendly in that working environment. So unfortunately, there's still very high percentage of the fishing harvesters have to claim here in loss compensation claim. Then that lead to my next stage question is protection. So are our fish harvesters well protected in the current legal system in Atlantic Canada? So what I did is a cross province show comparative legal analysis to identify whether certain province probably have a stronger protection. Some other provinces may not have that stronger protection for the fishing harvesters. So if we take Newfoundland and Labrador for example the workplace and now the workers' compensation board of and now do have compensation coverage for all fishing harvesters, but the gap is off-season.

(00:42:49):
So basically being protected on season. But if they're doing repairs off the season, well, unfortunately that may not be covered for other provinces. Not in all Atlantic provinces have specific occupational health and safety standards for fish harvesters. For example, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, they do have specific regulation available there, but for New Brunswick and PEI, those regulations, those guidelines much more limited. And this also being identified by the Transportation Safety Board accident investigation report. So there need to be more regulatory training, awareness, educational efforts, trying to improve fish harvester's ability to identify and also to manage hazards onboard the vessel. So that is basically my, my research about from the two side prevention and protection.

(00:43:44):
Yeah, there's a lot going on there for sure. Yeah, I guess maybe we could for a bit touch on the prevention side. So yeah, talking about like the hearing loss for example. And yeah, it seems like, like you mentioned that yeah, they just need to work in that environment. They can't always be wearing the hearing protection. When you're looking at changing that, is that actually like changing the physical structures of the boats, make them not as noisy? Is that something that might be happening?

(00:44:07):
Well, that's a fundamental approach actually that also desirable, but that's also the most costly one. So, so about this part is basically the intervention you really need to be at the regulatory level and the construction of vessels. When we're talking about small fishing vessels or small vessels in general compared to a larger vessel, the regulations and the governance is not as strong as comprehensive, as strict. It's also considered their operational and the nature of their business. So that's why to improve the construction standard, let's say at the construction level, to ensure that the noise can be controlled, the noise can be isolated, the noise can be eliminated. Usually that will take a much longer regulatory efforts. So that's basically a major challenge we identified. The second approach is, let's say thinking about at the providential occupational health and safety hazards, there is general providential, occupational health and safety hazards.

(00:45:13):
Basically, if the noise level is beyond certain level, there need to be monitored. And at the same time, if there are hearing loss occurred, then that will be compensable. But the challenge is how to we engage the industry, for example, to have regular check of the fishing harvesters hearing loss and hearing loss is only one health impact from noise exposure. The second one is non-auditory health impact, for example, the chance to get cardiovascular disease including hypertension. So there are also some chronic disease need to be traced. Well, currently we not comprehensively cover all those things. And even when we communicate with other fishing harvesters in Newfoundland and we ask them what do they think would be the most useful tools for them to basically protect their hearing, protecting their health in a noise envir noisy working environment, they say need more education.

(00:46:13):
And they also would like to know more about what coverage available for them and whether, for example, they need to go to the hearing test. So whether this resource would be available for them, hearing loss when it's occurred, when it's noticed you are at the very late stage. So from a kind of early stage to engage young fishing harvesters, current generation to make sure they pay attention to their hearing, to pay attention to the regular hearing tests. But at the same time also to de-stigmatize, because with hearing loss you also have the stigma related to that and that also become a barrier for the fishing harvesters to actively engage in that conversation. They do realize that noise is a hazard for them and they do want it to protect themselves. And one fish harvester actually she shared is when she tried to wear the hearing protector, but because of that, she actually increased the risk almost falling overboard. So that is basically a very difficult judgment call for her to sacrifice hearing loss, which is not fatal, and then try to avoid another fatal risk on board. So that is a major challenge when we're talking about occupational health and safety on board.

(00:47:27):
Yeah, and I, and I wonder like you mentioned the education side, like is there maybe like when they're looking at safety and maybe the cost or the practicality or just the, the risks associated, is education part of that so that they know that this is important to invest in this or learn about this?

(00:47:41):
I would say this is more like empowering fish harvest turns know their working environment best. So what they really need is actually, for example, what's covered and what would be the prevention measures they can take. And then we are to knock which door if they need help, they have a strong consensus to recognize noise exposure as a hazard. But when they are, it's also desirable for them to make the vessel safe and to control the noise level onboard the vessel. But the issue is like they feel they have limited resources to address that. So that's the major challenge. So when we thinking about education and awareness resources, not just for fish harvesters, I would say also for our, let's say the operator manager and then to identify this issue, to promote this, to do the engagement with the fishing community and then to help them to prevent, because when there are claims that also workers' compensation board need to take a measure to prevent that because those things become a claim and that means compensation.

(00:48:51):
Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I guess we could talk a bit more about the protection side. Yeah, so maybe just tell me a bit more about the work you're doing there as far as protecting people in this industry.

(00:49:01):
The major challenge legally speaking in Canada when we doing this type of study is federal providential jurisdictions. So for navigation and shipping, generally falling under federal occupational health and safety jurisdiction. But for fishing, considering it could be local, considering it may not be interprovincial, but in some cases our fishing people also do interprovincial activities. So we are actually facing a very complicated workforce. And when we're talking about protection, first, if there is occupational health and safety in compliance, should providential occupational health and safety authority being notified and they issued corrections, warning those things, or should Transport Canada or those people in charge of vessel safety being involved? So what we cover is whether first under occupational health and safety law, whether fishing activities being covered by their occupational health and safety law, is there any specialized guideline? Because if you have very general occupational health and safety standards applicable to vessel, more likely our fishing industry will say it's not realistic to apply those at sea if you basically use those land-based standards.

(00:50:26):
So that's why the first study I did is to study whether under their occupational health and safety, whether fishing would be covered in Nova Scotia and in Newfoundland it's covered, but in New Brunswick and PEI, relatively not as strong and explicit. And for the workers' compensation similarly, so strongest basically more detailed information being found under Newfoundland and Labrador and then is Nova Scotia for New Brunswick and PEI, there needs to be a more comprehensive review and to enhance their occupational health and safety protection as well as workers' compensation coverage. It's also about resources. So basically workers' compensation board, they need to provide coverage for all industries or people being covered by this workers' compensation scheme to have special attention to the fishing harvesters. So it may requires more attention from them. One thing I recently observed is also from the protection level.

(00:51:33):
Not all fishing harvesters could be covered by workers' compensation in some of the provinces. That is quite shocking for me when I identify that. And also occupational health and safety law in one province exclude fishing from their occupational health and safety coverage to ensure fishing harvester also have equivalent coverage and other workforce would be important. So if we couldn't or they change the safety working environment, at least let's do the protection well. So that's probably one concern I have. The other concern I have is about the current complex of the governance regarding fishing, fishing safety. It has some federal component, it also has some providential components, but when things involve too many chefs in the kitchen to coordinate those things might be difficult. And also in particular makes the front line fishing harvesters in a more vulnerable situation. Because when things occur, it takes them more challenges and more time to understand the system. In Newfoundland, actually they give more instruction for the fishing harvest. They do have a kind of guidelines Nova Scotia has some, but New Brunswick and PEI from their public website information very limited. So this is probably also one thing I identified. There might be some of the efforts made by the Provincial Workers' Compensation Board, but to communicate to the public to make sure the people in the need could find the right resources, that would be an another concern.

(00:53:18):
And I guess like do you have any insights on why they would not be covered? Like why is that happening or the bureaucracy, like why is there more of that in that industry versus other industries? Do you have any ideas?

(00:53:30):
This is not just Atlantic Canada. I would say globally speaking, maritime jurisdiction is really one of the most challenging part. The reason it's one because of their mobility for those traditional occupational health and safety standards, let's say developed in those high-risk sector for the mining, they're fixed somewhere online. They're not basically say today Cornerbrook mine, the next day the mine move to St. John's or Bonavista. But if you doing fishing where the fish goes, you goes. So that's why for many other jurisdictions, for other countries, it's also a challenge to provide compensation coverage for the crew. And in Atlantic Canada, I would say if we compare with other countries' protection regarding fishers, at least Newfoundland & Labrador and Nova Scotia provide such provisions, protection for their fish officers, for the people working in the fishing industry.

(00:54:35):
So what are some recommendations you might have to improve the things we've been talking about?

(00:54:40):
First thing I think is the review and also a better communication for the fishing harvester in these four provinces, so they could get the resources they need if there are limitation or gaps in the workers' compensation coverage that is urgent needed to be filled. Secondly, even for those with coverage, let's say in Newfoundland Labrador, they got on season, but what about off-season in particular when they're doing preparation? So could the workplace analysis coverage extend certainly for drawing upon hearing loss? One? So that is probably a kind of excellent case for a, how to address occupational health and safety. Hazarded, it's kind of invisible occupational health and safety hazard among fish harvesters. So one hand it's, it's got covered under the, an air workers' compensation scheme, but how to prevent that. So there need to be some resources to ensure there are regular tests, not just hearing tests, regular health check available for our fish harvesters. So, so that is basically some of the more practical side of recommendation. For a more higher level, the regional coordination, if there could be, let's say a regional coordinate fishing health and safety governance in Atlantic Canada, and that could better be coordinated with the federal maritime safety maritime training. So that probably could make this whole system more efficient because if you have an integrated portal for the user, it's much easier rather than the user going to too many departments to find the information. He or she needs

(00:56:24):
This work probably can be very challenging when you're dealing with loss or, or claims or, or people who are struggling. So yeah, I guess I'm just curious, Desai, what kind of, what got you interested in, in doing this work and, and working with people who work at sea?

(00:56:38):
So my first career, I was trained to be a maritime lawyer in China when I was started to practice in a port city in China. Basically my day-to-Day life. One of the job task is to deal with personal injury and fatalities at sea. So people who could be killed at sea. It's basically quite frequent every year you basically receive those fetal accidents claims. And as a maritime lawyer, our job is to handle those claims from seafarers, from fish harvester. In one case, actually a marine casualty occurred in South China Sea. About 12 people died in that case. And it became a super difficult process to handle that claim, to settle that claim with all the surviving families. The main challenge for me at that time is there was so limited legal instruments available, no access to workers' compensation, for sure blocked.

(00:57:44):
And then we need to use alternative legal resources to handle that claim. First is also very challenging for the ship owner side is even more challenging and devastating for the surviving family side. And after that case, I thought maybe I should do some research regarding that. So that's why I decided to become a researcher to, to do this. My first career actually is about workers' compensation for seafarers. So that is my PhD thesis. And then I came to Canada focus more on the prevention side, occupational health and safety for seafarer. And then working together with Professor Barb Neis and Ratana. And we kind of opened further to the fishing, occupational health and safety.

(00:58:30):
What's your connection to the ocean?

(00:58:34):
My connection to the ocean is I feel my best when I'm near the ocean. 'cause A day by the sea is good for the soul.

(00:58:52):
Next time on connecting to the ocean, I explore what the future of sustainable fisheries and coastal communities might look like.

(00:59:01):
When you put in place policies that just take into account that this is an individual job and you, you don't take it to account the rest, then you're forgetting about the community and about all the people that are involved in the community.

(00:59:15):
So, political, autonomy, sustainable harvests, economic development and community wellbeing were these kind of four big goals that people had for the, the future of the industry.

(00:59:27):
You know, the sustainability of our fishery really is the sustainability of communities. It's the livelihood of people, but not only their livelihoods, it's their culture. You know, it, it's their reason for being so, and that's the particularly important here in Labrador.

(00:59:40):
Connecting to the Ocean was produced by Michael Bartz with production assistance from Evan Andrews, Truman, Osmond, Nantakorn Chayangkul, Vesna Kerezi, and Ratana Chuenpagdee. Special thanks to all the guests who gave generously of their time and expertise.

(00:59:55):
I'm trying to save the planet, oh with someone please save me?

(01:00:05):
In Over My Head's. Connecting to the Ocean season was made possible with support from the Ocean Frontier Institute, module I and Memorial University.