“A Preventable Workplace Fatality” - Cheryl Shock - Threads of Life

Cheryl shares Sean’s story, the circumstances surrounding his death, and the devastating gaps in training, safety protocols, and accountability that followed.  This episode explores the realities families face after workplace tragedy, the role of employer responsibility, and why speaking up about safety can save lives. Cheryl also discusses how Threads of Life became a critical source of support and healing.

Transcript

Perley Brewer   0:10
Welcome to today's podcast. My name is Pearly Brewer and I will be your host. Today's podcast is is with and we're honored to have Cheryl Shock. Cheryl lost her husband Sean in workplace fatality. Welcome, Cheryl.

Cheryl   0:25
Thanks for having me.

Perley Brewer   0:27
Look, Cheryl, let's start by maybe getting you to tell us a little bit about your husband, Sean.

Cheryl   0:34
Where to start? Sean was a happy guy. He was always smiling. He loved to visit with people. He was a social butterfly. He would. He didn't care if he knew you were not. He would sit and talk to you. He loved to go out for suppers.
He was a perpetual driver who loved to drive, so we had quads, we had snowmobiles, we had side by sides, and if we weren't working, basically we were out in the Bush playing on toys, love to camp and he was just a happy guy.
Didn't didn't really matter who he who he met. You were instant friends with Sean. So it was. It was different for me that I was usually the social butterfly in the in the team. And when I met him, he was way more social than I was. So Sean had a lot of friends.
And a lot of acquaintances. And it was just he was a fun guy to be around.

Perley Brewer   1:33
So now you live in Alberta, am I correct?

Cheryl   1:36
Yeah, I'm in Alberta. When I was with Sean, we lived in southern Alberta in the Crowsnest Pass. So right in the mountains, if you've heard of the Frank slide, Turtle Mountain is what we looked at out our front window. So beautiful place to live. Beautiful country.
A lot of fun things to do down there.

Perley Brewer   1:56
So what did Sean do for work?

Cheryl   1:58
So Sean was a truck driver. It was his. It was his calling in life. It was his joy. Sean was born with cerebral palsy, which people think, oh, cerebral palsy. For him, it looked like he had kind of had a stroke. If you would look at an an older person, that's what it looked like.
He had a bit of a limp and his right hand. He could grasp things, but he didn't really know how tight he was holding them and when he was getting his driver's license, he actually had to fight for it. He had to get his doctor to sign all kinds of forms because back then.
In the day he was disabled, right and they treated people different back then. So he really had to fight for his driver's license. And he had the utmost respect for that driver's license because he had to work so hard to get it. He didn't take it for granted.

Perley Brewer   2:41
Mm-hmm.
So what? What kind of tracking did he do?

Cheryl   2:59
Well, when I met, he was hauling molten sulfur from a gas plant so they would melt sulfur all night and he would haul them to another facility. But he hauled everything. He hauled water, gravel.

Perley Brewer   3:04
Yeah.

Cheryl   3:15
Asphalt depending wherever he was working for a job. When I met him, he was working away from home and when I moved down there and we moved in together, he wanted to get a job closer to home because he was used to being gone seven days off, seven days on and he really didn't want to be away.
Wanted to spend more time with me, which was was nice, but it's hard in a small community to find jobs and in southern Alberta it's like everywhere else, the jobs are limited and he had the previous summer, had worked for one of the counties.

Perley Brewer   3:41
Mm-hmm.

Cheryl   3:50
Doing world work and maintenance and and hauling water and gravel and that type of thing. And that spring he had found a job. In 2013, Southern Alberta flooded Calgary flooded. We had major flooding. And because we're in the mountains, they were.
In a rock quarry and they were using that rock for the flood mitigation in Calgary, so anywhere they had their ditches and berms, they were reinforcing it with rock and that's what he was doing when he had his accident. He was working for a rock quarry hauling rock.

Perley Brewer   4:28
So do you want to tell us a little more about what happened that day of the accident?

Cheryl   4:33
Sure. So again, no one really knows what happened, because the only person who was there was Sean. We can only go by what occupational health and safety gave us as a report.
But it was a Friday. No good thing happens on a Friday. That's my. That's my point of view these days. He had gone to work and actually I had gone to work too. So different places. And when I was at work, I noticed it's a small town.
I noticed the fire trucks and ambulances and stuff go out of town and in the summer in the Crows Nest Pass, it's campers wall to wall campers and I assumed there had been an accident on the highway, so I didn't really think anything of it.
But you know, the day went on and kind of it was normal for me when I got home, Sean didn't get home until a few hours after me, so I had made supper and stuff and when I had the knock on the door, I assumed it was.
Was coming to visit because our house was a revolving door of people, so it was. It was kind of normal that people would show up just unannounced. And when I opened the door, it was RCMP members advising me that Sean had died.
What we got from the report was that when Sean got to work on Friday, there was no rock to haul, so they had had some equipment breakdowns and there was no rock to haul.
And instead of sending Sean home, they had him working with a mechanic fixing the crew bus that they hauled the workers up to the mine site. And.
What happened is.
They were changing a hanger bearing. Now I'm not a mechanic. I had to Google everything once I got the report they needed parts, so the actual mechanic went into town and sometime during that time.
Sean went under the bus. It was a 2000 Ford 450 Super Duty 21 passenger bus. He went under that vehicle and he disconnected the front portion of the.
Drive shaft from the emergency brake assembly and it resulted in that bus being free rolling and he was pinned underneath the vehicle and he died of massive head trauma. They say it was instant but who knows. So that bus rolled down the incline while Sean was underneath.
Trapping him in the front wheel well where he sustained those fatal injuries when the employee came back with parts was when Sean was found, so they don't actually know.
When it happened for about four hours, no one had heard from Sean. No one had checked on him, and people might have walked by him all afternoon, not knowing he was even there. The manager thought that he had gone home for the day.
And yeah, it was just kind of, we don't know, we don't we kind of know what happened but we don't know when it happened. And basically Sean was doing a job, he wasn't trained for. They had asked him to do a job.
That he hadn't. I mean, he maybe had a clue how to do, but he was not trained to do it. And with his limited mobility, with his hands shouldn't have been doing it.
It was, yeah, it was. It was strange because the the day after it happened. Well, the day after it happened on a Friday, I didn't realize that nobody works on the weekend. So medical examiner doesn't work. Coroner's office didn't work. None of them work. So basically, the first conversation I had was on the Monday.
And it was a call from the medical examiner asking questions about Sean, you know, hair colour, distinguishing marks, that kind of thing. And then she asked about him being a mechanic. And at that point, I was like, Sean was a truck driver. Like, he wasn't a mechanic.
And I kept going over and over. I'm like he was not a like, what are you talking about? He was not a mechanic because I didn't know any of this had happened in the background. I assumed it was a truck accident I had. That's what I assumed that oh, you know, truck roll they're, you know, it's a it's a mining accident, right.
Not knowing that he was doing a job that he was not trained for and it kind of kind of progressed from there. But yeah, that's kind of the the the short story of it was he was working on a a passenger vehicle that he should have never been around.

Perley Brewer   9:49
So what did the RCMP did they not tell you that the type of accident was?

Cheryl   9:54
No, they couldn't tell me anything. Yeah, it was. It was really strange. I had no information. I mean, small town. The rumor mill over the weekend. I had kind of gleamed some. Some things. But.

Perley Brewer   10:01
Yeah.

Cheryl   10:09
No, no information. I it was it was. I was totally cut off from the situation which made it even worse, right? That I had no information and.

Perley Brewer   10:09
Boy, that was a.
That's a tough way to find out.

Cheryl   10:23
It was a tough way to find out and it was anger, right? It had a lot more anger because it was like, why? Why didn't he just come home, right? Why was he doing that? He could have come home. We could have went quoting, you know, we could have done something.
But again, because and this is my opinion, whether he felt this way or not, Sean always felt he had to prove himself right because of his disability. He he always felt he had to work harder, work longer.
Do more because people thought he was less than and whether that was part of it. In his mind, I don't know. But he also was a helpful guy. He loved to help people and and be helpful. So when the mechanic says, oh, this is what I'm doing today, Sean probably said well, hey, you know.
Is it OK if I stay and help whatever the fella's name was that was doing it and the manager probably said sure. Right. Like who knows? Who knows what happened?

Perley Brewer   11:24
Now, now, would there have been anyone else in the garage when it did happen? You said the mechanic would it went to pick up some parts. Would there have been? Was it a small garage? A big garage?

Cheryl   11:34
It was outside, so there was actually no buildings. There was kind of an Atco trailer. When you walk. It was a big sight. So when you went off the the mining Rd. there was a way scale for the trucks, a little kind of Atco trailer where the.

Perley Brewer   11:36
Oh, OK.
OK.
Mm-hmm.

Cheryl   11:53
Secretary worked. And then you went probably a half a mile in and that's where they kind of had the staging area where the employees would park their vehicles and where they would get on the bus and then they would go half an hour up the mountain to where they were actually hauling rock down from. So it was a a big, wide open place.
And where they were working on this, this bus was kind of in that middle area. So there was people up the hill on the mine and there was people kind of at the at the entryway where that ADCO trailer was.
So they would have kind of driven by that area, but not necessarily knowing they were even working on that passenger bus because they weren't working that day. So it was outside. Of course it's on the side of a mountain. So everything's on a hill, right? It should have been blocked.

Perley Brewer   12:39
OK.

Cheryl   12:48
Yeah, just a lot of a lot of things that went wrong.

Perley Brewer   12:52
When was the first you heard from the company?

Cheryl   12:56
I've never heard from the company to this day. I've never heard from them. The week after it happened, they claimed bankruptcy. They were charged with offences they had no safety program.

Perley Brewer   13:00
No one.

Cheryl   13:12
Yeah, they had the charges. I went to three court dates where no one from the company showed up, and that third one, they basically said that there's no way to proceed because they're gone. They're in the wind. So I've never heard from them. Not once.

Perley Brewer   13:32
What would the would they have been fined as part of the process? How much were they fined? Do you remember?

Cheryl   13:36
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, I don't even remember what it was I would have to look, and I don't even know if it got that far because they they never showed up right for it to even kind of get that far. And I wonder about that because.

Perley Brewer   13:42
Yeah.
Yeah.

Cheryl   13:54
You know, they another part that kind of makes me. I'm not angry, but sad that, you know, they kind of moved on with their lives. Probably opened another company a month down the road and we're here left in in ruins.

Perley Brewer   14:05
Yeah.

Cheryl   14:11
And they're kind of back to work. No, nothing wrong with them. Right. And that's something that I wish could change. I know, you know, corporations and things have different rules, but.

Perley Brewer   14:16
Yep.

Cheryl   14:25
There should be some kind of accountability for things like that, and there really isn't.

Perley Brewer   14:32
So from the point of view of yourself, did you have any any children at that point or any?

Cheryl   14:32
Yeah.
No, no, no children a bit different for us because my family is all in northern Alberta and Sean's family is all from the South. So when it happened, I really didn't have any kind of support system there, sort of. The friends were all Sean's and family was all Sean's.

Perley Brewer   14:39
Other family members.

Cheryl   14:56
So it was. It was really tough and it just being a small community that everybody knew me and everyone knew Sean and it was a it was the loss for the whole community, right, because there really hadn't been that kind of accident locally.
And kind of it it kind of brought things into kind of realization that there were no, there were no safety.
Protocols. I mean, they didn't even have a way to call down to town. There was no cell service up at the line. Someone had to physically drive half an hour down the mountain to finally get cell signal to call RCMP and and fire department and everything. So.
Kind of those things that people hadn't thought of. Like, it doesn't happen here. It doesn't happen to us. Kind of brought that into sort of realization and it was just kind of sad because a lot of people lost their jobs. I mean, it was a big work site and a lot of local people who really needed those jobs.
Lost those jobs when they shut down, so it didn't just affect sort of me and our family. It affected the whole community.

Perley Brewer   16:09
Yeah.
How big of a worksite was it? How many people would have been employed? Do you have any idea?

Cheryl   16:17
Yeah.
So there was probably when it happened there was about. I'm trying to think there was three crews. There's probably 40 or 50 people just in our local site that were employed there. And then there was.

Perley Brewer   16:29
Mm-hmm.

Cheryl   16:35
You know, because they had sites other places, so it was it was a big company and this was just kind of a tiny portion of it. Yeah, yeah.

Perley Brewer   16:40
OK.
So without without your support system in place, how did you make it through what? What helped you along the way?

Cheryl   16:49
Well it there's a lot of things, but I'm I'm one of those people that I can't just I'm I don't sit still. So after it happened I wasn't working and I just needed something. I needed an outlet.
And you kind of get all this paperwork when someone dies, you know, there's WCB. And there's all these things. And I finally sat down one day and started going through all this paperwork, and there was a flyer there for threads life. And I kind of looked through it and I thought kind of interesting. And then, you know, I was on my computer and I went.
And on Facebook and I found them and I kind of, you know, read about them and I messaged them and one of the people reached out to me and said, you know, can I give you a call? Sure. So she gave me a call, and they actually connected me with a family guide. So another woman who had lost her husband in similar circumstances.
Circumstances as kind of a support system and she called and I wasn't really ready to talk then, but it was just nice knowing that I had someone to talk to and someone to touch base with and threads of life has family forms once a year, and I actually went to my first family forum.
Four months after Sean died and met wonderful people, wonderful people, when I went to my first session, I don't even know who is doing it and it's part something I talk about often. I have no idea what she was talking about because the whole thing was a blur like it was four months.
My brain wasn't even kind of functioning at that point and she said, you know, we're all part of a group that no one wants to belong to, like we're all members of this group. None of us wanted to be part of. And you know, what can we do for each other to help us support that?
And threads of life is it's a lifeline, really, because it's different than someone passing away from cancer or passing away. There's all kinds of groups for those kind of losses, but a workplace tragedy is.
Instant it's there's no lead up to it. It's out of the blue. A lot of the time. It's young men, so people with young families and it really hits different because then you're going through all the legal stuff as well.
Which doesn't happen with a lot of things and threads of life just was a lifeline. It was someone who was always there to talk to. It was someone there to bounce ideas off of. It was just people to grieve with. We my personally and I'm sure a lot of people.
I didn't read for very, very, very many years. I just wouldn't let myself. And not that I was in denial or anything. I just wasn't ready. And through their the programs and speaking to people. Finally it was like.
Like, OK, now's the time. We need to to deal with some of this stuff and through them I speak. And it's just nice being able to keep Sean's.
His story alive, right. It's it's fun to talk about him. Right. Because how many times do you get to talk about your loved one after they're gone, you know, with family and friends. But to other people, it's just nice that he's still being remembered and being able to share his story is something I'll always appreciate doing.
Wing.

Perley Brewer   20:28
How old was Sean when he died?

Cheryl   20:33
Sean was 40424042. I'm trying to think of how old I was when he when he died.

Perley Brewer   20:39
What do you do?

Cheryl   20:47
I'm going to do the math while I think about that. Isn't that funny? The things that you forget while you're, you know.

Perley Brewer   20:50
No.
No. You mentioned you mentioned a moment ago age and you know we we see so much statistics on different ages of people, new people to the workplace and so on. I'm just curious.

Cheryl   21:02
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.

Perley Brewer   21:06
So had you ever talked about safety before?

Cheryl   21:10
You know yes and no.
He was always very careful because he had a disability, right? So, you know, climbing into like their big trucks climbing into trucks, he had to be more careful. Did he actively talk safety? No. But he was very conscious that, you know, if he worked at the mine, he needed his hard hat. He needed his steel toe.

Perley Brewer   21:20
Mm-hmm.

Cheryl   21:35
Boots. He needed his reflective vest. You know, he was always very. This is what I have to do. This is my job and I need all of this to do my job. Now, this work site and this is part of the part I feel guilty about.
About two weeks before Sean's accident, one of the employee trucks was actually run over by a piece of equipment and totaled.

Perley Brewer   22:02
Whoa.

Cheryl   22:02
And luckily no one was in the truck. Luckily, no one was around the truck, and that really should have flagged something. Saying, you know this isn't safe. Like, how did that happen like that? It's a truck. It's a it's a half ton truck. How did it get run over by?
Piece of equipment it you know, and at now thinking back of it, I should have been like you. You can't work there anymore. But when you're in that situation and you're in a small town where there's no jobs, any job you get is something you're going to keep going to, even if.

Perley Brewer   22:37
Hmm.

Cheryl   22:41
In the back of your mind, you're thinking I shouldn't be doing this, and that's probably the part I feel worst about is that I should have told him that, you know, we can find something else he can do something else. But hindsight's, you know, everyone has good hindsight right when you're in that situation, you're just thinking he's got a job.

Perley Brewer   22:58
Yeah.

Cheryl   23:02
We're both working. Life is good. It's the summertime. You know, where we going next weekend that we're off? You don't think about not coming home from work.

Perley Brewer   23:14
What do you think when you hear the comment and it's a comment? Unfortunately, we hear a lot, is that, oh, it never happened to me. If someone says that to you today, what's what's your response?

Cheryl   23:24
You know, I've had that conversation with my nephews because I have nephews that are in their 20s and I've had the conversation with them that, you know, don't goof around at work. Don't you know one of them was working kind of.
An oilfield job and I was like safety this safety, that safety, this and cuz I told them I said, you know, Uncle Sean, you know it happened to him. It happened to anyone and you're young and you're with your buddies and you're, you know goofing around maybe not planning to.
Get in an accident or to something bad, but it happens and I tell people all the time, you know, make sure your Will's up to date. Make sure you're you know, and I people must think I'm crazy because I'm, you know, all of these things you should do because it could happen to you.
You know, it could happen to anybody. I mean, I could go out to go buy groceries and be hit on the street like you never know when your time is, when it's your time, it's your time. But to think that it'll never happen to you is it's crazy and not that I'm a super safety freak now either.
But I just think there's guidelines and rules for a reason, and especially at a work site, you know you need to really be on top of those. And here in Alberta, just this week we had two people up in around Fort McMurray.
Die in workplace accidents, so it you know it happens all the time with everyone with best intentions. You. You never know, right?

Perley Brewer   25:05
So what message would you send when you're speaking? And if you had much opportunity to speak?

Cheryl   25:12
Yeah, I have. I have a lot of messages in mind. One is to employers. Yeah. One is to employers because it really broke my heart that I never heard from them. It really, you know, whether I probably would have yelled at them and been not a nice person to them. But I.

Perley Brewer   25:18
Share some share some of them.

Cheryl   25:31
I just wish they would have reached out and, you know, not even say sorry, but just say, you know, we see you and we know that you're hurting from Sean's loss, but absolutely nothing was. It was heartbreaking. So the one of the first things I say is like, if you're an employer and you have employees.
Please make sure your safety protocol is up to date. Please make sure you train all of your employees in the jobs that they're supposed to be doing. Please don't ask employees to do jobs they're not trained to do, whether they volunteer or not.
And then please, like they didn't, one thing they didn't even know my name. They didn't know my name. They didn't have Sean's address. They didn't have an emergency contact for him. And we're lucky. It's a small town because the the fire.
Fireman, who identified Sean, was a of course it's a small town. He went to school with Sean. He knew Sean. I didn't have to go do any of that, thankfully, but he actually had to bring the police to my house because the employer didn't know any of that information, didn't have Sean's address, didn't know my name, didn't have an emergency.
Emergency contact. So I tell them, like, make sure you know those people. I mean, you don't have to know that. Joe has five kids and they're in university and doing all this stuff. But you should at least know his address and whether he's married or has some kind of significant other and an emergency contact. How hard is that? Right. It was just.
So that's one of the first things that I tell like be a good boss, you know, and if something, God forbid, does happen, at least support the family. And I mean, it doesn't have to be financial. It doesn't. It just has to be that you're there, right. Like I said, I probably wouldn't have been very nice to them, but I would have liked to at least hear from them.
And the next thing I kind of preach about preach about in my in my speech to people is don't do work that you're not trained for. And a lot of people, especially young people, and I mean Sean wasn't young, but he always like I said, always felt that he needed to.
To do more and prove himself is to not do jobs that you're not trained for, or that you're not comfortable with because it's not worth it. It's not worth losing your life. It's not worth not coming home, and people don't realize that they can say no and or you know, I'm not trained to do.
Do this, but I would like to learn how to do this. You know. Can you train me to run the forklift? Can you? You train me to do whatever these jobs are. Because once you train me, I'll do it. But I need to learn how to do it first.
And then my last thing, I kind of leave with usually for my for my speech is because it was a small community and most of the friends that we had were, you know, they were Sean's friends. So with Sean's town, with Sean's friends.
It's just to be there for four people, right? So I moved. I moved away from the Crows Nest pass after it happened because I didn't have any support there. And it's sad to say, but.
Once Sean was gone, his friends were gone too, and it was just kind of left me like I didn't know what to do with myself. So I moved, which wasn't a bad thing. I mean, I miss it. I love the mountains. I love to go back there. But it's reminds me of Sean. And sometimes that's really.
Hard.

Perley Brewer   29:17
So one final question for me. How is Cheryl doing today?

Cheryl   29:19
Mm-hmm.
Charlotte's doing really well. I I'm got remarried, which I swore I would never do. My husband is wonderful. He actually kind of facilitated my grieving. It was funny because.
It's really hard, and especially in a small town to date after something like that happens because you're always so and so widow, you're always, you know, Sean's widow Sean, you know.
And when I met my current husband, he wasn't from there. And I said, you know, just a heads up, like when you come visit me kind of, this is my story. And he said, you know, that's OK. He said we can talk about him. You can cry. It doesn't bother me.
Because he himself was in a workplace accident, he was a firefighter paramedic and was injured in a workplace accident and I really think Sean brought us together because they're so similar, but they're really different.
As well, but he lets me talk about Sean. We have pictures of Sean in the house. He really encourages me to walk through kind of that grief. And and if I want to talk about him, I can talk about him.
And that's all hard for a lot of people to do, so I'm doing. I'm doing good. I'm in Edmonton now, you know, got great friends and great family and just kind of enjoying life.

Perley Brewer   30:55
Yeah. One thing that one of the other people I had on the Podcast mentioned that they found that a lot of people really had difficulty understanding what someone that had been involved in workplace accident, a survivor.
Uh.
Really, where they were at, they said, you know, they people seem to be able to understand if someone has cancer or heart disease or some of these things. But if you were a survivor of a workplace accident, they said they people couldn't, couldn't seem to relate to it. Did you find out the case as well?

Cheryl   31:15
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely, absolutely. They don't know how to. They don't know how to treat you, and they tend to treat you different. It's really weird because I've like I've had loss in like, you know, my dad passed away. I've had people. I've lost people before, but I've never been treated like I was treated.
Did when Sean died of a workplace accident?
It's really weird and I don't even know how to explain it, but without a group like threads of life, there really is no group to kind of deal with that and I don't know if it's because of the. There might be some kind of, you know, legal realm of.
Justifications with you know you might have a court case, or you might have this and it's a prolonged thing like it took two years for me to get the workplace for the occupational health and safety report. So it's not something, you know, when someone dies of cancer, you have the funeral. You probate the will and you're done. Right. With this, it can take.
Years and years, especially if you have to go to court like there's some people like 5-10 years, it drags on. So it's something that's always there and it really wears on the family because it is always there for a long time.
And it's really it's, it's a lot different than sort of regular when people pass away and it does kind of separate you from everyone else because you're always going back to there.
Especially when you're dealing with WCB and all these other groups that it's really it's constant in your life for a long time and a lot of people don't know how to deal with that, right that you know, you still are dealing with Sean, you know, two years down the road.
And it brings it back up again. You know, you get the report and you're reading the report and you're you're back to where you were two years ago in the frame of mind. Right. And it's hard for a lot of people to understand that.

Perley Brewer   33:34
Hello, Cheryl. Thank you very much for sharing your story with us today and with our listeners. A final comment, if you are listening today and you have suffered a loss of of loved ones to a workplace accident as Cheryl mentioned, to reach out to the threads of life.
It's a tremendous organization that we talked and had a number of guests on our program that talk about threads of life and and what they've done to help in, in, in certainly one has to be one of the the hardest times of a person's life. So again feel free to reach out to threads of life. It's very easy to find just Google.
And that gets you on your way. Again, thank you very much, Cheryl.

Cheryl   34:12
Thank you so much for having me.

Perley Brewer   34:14
So I'd like to thank Cheryl for listening or for joining us rather on today's Podcast for our listeners, stay safe and have a good week.