Originally Posted December 12th, 2016
Hello everyone,
In an effort to keep all BWA members “in the loop” on the latest trends and happenings in the wood industry, I am sharing with you all an email I received from a distraught BWA manufacturing member this morning.
“Morning Mike.
We had a visit from the Ministry of Labour yesterday.
I have never worried about a visit since we have new equipment with all the safety gear on them and out shop is clean, but they shut us down with no time to comply. We run our CNC on a 2014 Belfab 7.5 hp, 3500 cfm indoor dust collector. The dust collector is manufactured in Canada and CSA approved, how is this legal to sell if your not allowed to use it ? According to the Ministry you are non-compliant if you have more than a 1000 cfm unit indoors. I told them we would do whatever is needed to comply, they advised that we have to hire an engineer and get a PSR. I spoke to the inspector’s boss and pleaded my case to give us a week to determine what we need to do to comply and come up with a plan. Order stands. I have already called a local engineer, the fire department and dust collector suppliers to get the ball rolling. If we have to pay 50k and cease operations for 3 months until we can get a new outdoor dust collector we will loose all of our customers and employees I have been through hundreds of shops and 99% of them have indoor dust collectors and will not comply with MLO. I know of a couple other shops that got caught in the same situation in the last couple weeks. You may want to warn the rest of the members .”
I hope this information is helpful to those BWA members that may be in non-compliance with this.
Best regards,
Mike Baker
Executive Director
1-226-668-5455