Training/Education

In commercial fishing, lives have been lost and lifejackets not worn. The lives lost impact coastal communities and families. Vessel disasters and falls overboard account for most deaths. From 2000-2018 there were ninety-three fishermen who died in Washington and Oregon. Only five were wearing a lifejacket and of them, three were not wearing it properly. Weather decisions, navigation, vessel stability, as well as other prevention strategies are important to reduce vessel disasters.

Fatal and non-fatal injuries in the agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors remain both elevated and poorly documented, compared to other work settings. The proposed surveillance project expands on the current Risk Information System for Commercial (RISC) Fishing, to encompass agriculture, forestry, and fishing in the four state (Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington) PNASH region.  

Project aims are to:  

The overall objectives of this project are to evaluate emerging pesticide application technologies and educational programming as interventions for breaking the pesticide exposure pathway on Northwest fruit farming systems. Labor-intensive fruit commodities put farmworkers and their families at disproportionate risk of pesticide-related illness via pesticide handling, drift, or the take-home exposure pathways.

Logging is among the most dangerous professions in the United States. Manual felling of timber with chainsaws and setting of cable log chokers accounted for 47% of injuries in Idaho between 2011-2014. Building on a recent PNASH pilot project, a library of wearable- and location-based human activity recognition (HAR) models will be developed and coded into a smartwatch app prototype to enhance the safety and efficiency of forestry work in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington through increased situational awareness (SA) among workers on remote cable logging operations.  

The salmon set gillnet fishery has the highest fatalities in Alaska and fatalities for Alaska Native workers are on the rise. Ten out of fifteen fatalities from commercial fishing vessel disasters in Alaska from 2010-2014 occurred in open skiffs, the type of vessel used in salmon set gillnetting.