Building a safety practice for British Columbia's remote and coastal employers.

The challenge

A safety expert's time belongs in the field.

Thunderbird Safety Consulting is a single-operator consultancy: Carey Pootlass owns it, runs it and makes its decisions directly. He has held occupational health and safety roles continuously since 2018, as a coordinator, then an officer, then owner and advisor.

Every hour spent on a website, a funding application or a proposal is an hour not spent on safety work. Our job is to carry the business side, so Carey can carry the safety side.

What we do together

Funding, the right way round

We research which funding programs are genuinely open to Thunderbird before anything is written, then prepare the applications worth writing. Carey reviews them and submits them in his own name.

A website and a public presence

We are building Thunderbird's new website and digital profiles, written only from facts Carey has confirmed, with his own branding to come from a designer in his community.

The offer, in writing

We helped put Thunderbird's services into a clear structure: three packages that build on each other, a ten-minute intake questionnaire, and an implementation guide a crew can actually follow.

What Thunderbird offers

Thunderbird builds safety programs for small and medium British Columbia employers, including forestry, construction, remote and coastal operations, and Indigenous-community employers.

• Essential: a customized company safety manual, a core forms package, an implementation guide and an orientation session. Not a template with a logo pasted on.
• Certification-Ready: everything in Essential, plus a safety program wellness check (a gap analysis against COR or SAFE Companies) with a written deficiency report and a prioritized action list.
• Management System: everything in Certification-Ready, plus exception reporting, training matrix oversight, an annual program review and ongoing advisory access.

Programs are set up inside the software a client already uses, or on paper and PDF to start, and the client keeps ownership of its own records.

Carey's documented credentials include National Construction Safety Officer (BC Construction Safety Alliance, 2020), Construction Safety Officer (ASTTBC Technology Professionals) and Occupational First Aid Level 3 (WorkSafeBC, 2024).

The opportunity

Safety where help is furthest away.

Remote and coastal worksites carry risks that a city site does not: crews working alone or in isolation, long distances to medical help, weather that changes the job by the hour. Thunderbird's forestry package includes emergency response planning for remote and coastal sites, with check-in procedures for workers alone or in isolation.

As community-owned and Indigenous-community employers take on more construction, forestry and infrastructure work, a written program that crews actually use matters more. Certification can be part of that: WorkSafeBC describes COR as "a voluntary employer certification program intended to motivate employers to take a proactive role in occupational health and safety".

A manual on a shelf protects no one. A program run every week, by people who understand the place it is run in, is what keeps people safe.

COR description checked September 2026 on WorkSafeBC's certificate of recognition page.

In Carey's words