Don Preece knows first-hand what it’s like to get sick while working at one of B.C.’s remote work camps. He came down with what he said was referred to as “the Kitimat cough” for three weeks, after a virus ripped through the Rio Tinto smelter work camp in that northwestern town for three weeks in 2013. “Twenty-one days coughing up phlegm, fevers — and they still don’t know what hit us,” he said. “They said ‘Oh, we’ve got all the protocols in for hand washing.’ They had people in there opening the doors for us.
But you can not control a 500- or 600-man camp and monitor everything that every other person touches. It’s impossible.” On Wednesday, Preece’s son, who’s an ironworker, flew to the Two Rivers Site C dam work camp to join a crew of