Alberta wildfire evacuation highlights growing use of tracking workers using RFID
CALGARY — When last year’s ferocious Alberta wildfire threatened Suncor Energy’s oilsands upgrader near Fort McMurray, the rush to safely remove hundreds from the area provided a rare large-scale test of technology that can let companies know the location of every single worker.
The evacuation highlighted how radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology — long used to track products in warehouses, equipment in mines and even cattle in feedlots — is increasingly being used to monitor workers on big Canadian industrial sites.
Everyone at the Suncor (TSX:SU) site last May was wearing an RFID fob, which identifies who and where they were and includes a “panic button” that can be pushed to summon help, said Doreen Cole, the company’s senior vice-president of oilsands maintenance and reliability.
“Over 1,000 workers were confirmed as safely evacuated in about 30 minutes,” she said, adding that most were not Suncor staff but contractors performing maintenance during a planned shutdown.