On a sunny day, Port Moody craft breweries have a festive air with patios crammed with people enjoying a break in the weather.
But the party atmosphere quickly disappears in the warehouse behind the tap room where safety and cleanliness are key to creating some of the Lower Mainland’s most popular brews.
“It’s not easy work, it’s hard work. There’s a lot of lifting and a lot of repetition, and a lot of exposure to cleaning chemicals, we do have to be very careful,” said Parkside Brewery partner Vern Lambourne.
Parkside takes safety seriously and has numerous procedures in place to make sure workers don’t inhale toxic C02 gas when venting and cleaning tanks and take proper steps to clear the area if the alarm on the C02 monitor goes off.
The PoMo company also has a safety committee and a human resources employee who looks after safety issues for the company. Lambourne can’t think of any injuries sustained by workers in three years of business.

That’s an impressive record for an industry where workers can be at risk from everything from CO2 poisoning to drowning in a fermentation tank, as two winery workers did in 2002.
According to WorkSafeBC, the growing brewery and distillery industry is generating millions of dollars worth of injury claims, prompting the agency to conduct regular safety inspections and develop a series of posters and videos alerting workers to potential hazards.
Between 2013-2017, there were 515 time-loss claims with an average claim cost of $16,187, according to WorksafeBC, 14% of which were serious injury claims with an average claim cost of $42,034 and 78 days of work days lost.
Among the concerns are confined spaces, and Lambourne said he hires an outside contractor to deal with tank issues, and CO2 poisoning, another issue Parkside monitors and deals with seriously.
But new entrants to the industry could benefit from additional education, Lambourne agrees, and he supports the WorkSafeBC awareness initiative.

“I think it’s good. We recognize the importance of safety and it’s a growing industry, a lot of people are coming in with little or no experience,” he said.
According to WorkSafeBC, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a colorless, odorless gas produced during fermentation of alcoholic beverages and used in tank counter-pressure and dispensing systems. At high levels, workers can be overcome because C02 displaces the oxygen from the air they breathe.
Some dangerous areas including packing lines, dispensing areas, walk-in coolers and keg filling and cleaning areas.
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