Yellowknife (Apr 14/06) - Yellowknife city workers were three times more likely to be hurt on the job during 2005 than their counterparts in four Alberta municipalities, numbers obtained by Yellowknifer reveal.

The statistics appear to bolster complaints from union leaders that working conditions at the city are unsafe - an issue that came to a head in March 2005 when two firefighters died battling a blaze at Home Building Centre.

According to Yellowknifer calculations, City of Yellowknife workers were three times more likely to be hurt during 2005 than their counterparts in other municipalities. Figures come from the Workers Compensation Board of Alberta, the Government of Alberta and the cities of Airdrie, Grande Prairie, St. Albert and Cold Lake.

During that year, there were 37 so-called "incidents" involving municipal employees, according to Worker's Compensation Board figures. Those numbers include serious injuries and minor accidents.

Calculated by Yellowknifer, that translates into one accident for every 4.4 municipal employees. That figure is eight times worse than Airdrie, Alta., whose population is almost identical to Yellowknife's.

The capital also trailed Cold Lake (6.6), Grande Prairie (15.6) and St. Albert (19.55), according to numbers from those cities and the Alberta Worker's Compensation Board.

Overall, workers in those municipalities were three times less likely to be injured than their Yellowknife counterparts.

"One accident is too many," said Norm Smith, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada local that represents city workers.

During a council meeting three weeks ago, Smith blasted department heads for what he described as a city-wide apathy towards safety and training. He also called for changes to the way City Hall conducts the ill-attended and frequently cancelled committee meetings designed to promote safety.

"What they should really do is get off the rhetoric," Smith said last week.

City Hall compiled its own list of accidents since 2002, which Mayor Gord Van Tighem said still needs to be compared to baseline data from other communities.

"It has created questions," he said. "You have to study it."

There were between 42 and 36 incidents a year between 2002 and 2005.

But the number of serious accidents which resulted in sick leave has dropped from 21 in 2002 to zero through the first four months of this year. That total includes the deaths of firefighters Cyril Fyfe and Kevin Olson in March 2005.

"We appear to be in a downward trend," Van Tighem said. The city remains committed to working with the union to address its concerns, he added.

The Workers Compensation board of the Northwest Territories cannot, under the law, release information from other communities. That makes in difficult to compare Yellowknife's injury rate to others in the NWT.