Which incidents must be reported to Alberta OHS — and how fast

In the hour after a serious incident, an Alberta employer is juggling three different clocks — OHS notification, scene preservation, and WCB paperwork — while dealing with the human reality of someone being hurt. That hour goes very differently for companies that decided the answers in advance.

What must be reported to Alberta OHS

Section 33 of the OHS Act sets the reporting duty. Report incidents including:

• A worker fatality
• An injury or incident that has, or has the potential to have, a serious outcome — the classic examples being injuries requiring hospital admission, the collapse or structural failure of a building, structure, crane, hoist or similar equipment, explosions, fires and major unplanned releases that endanger workers

The phrase that trips people is “potentially serious.” A crane cable that parts with nobody underneath, the trench that slumps at lunch break — no injury, still the kind of near-serious event the regime wants to hear about, because the difference between it and a fatality was scheduling. When in doubt, the conservative call — reporting — is rarely wrong; the reverse can be an offence.

The three duties that follow

1. Notify OHS promptly. Alberta operates a 24-hour contact line for serious incidents. “We finished our internal review first” is not a timeline the Act recognizes.

2. Preserve the scene. For reportable incidents, the scene must not be disturbed except to save life, relieve suffering, prevent further danger, or with an officer’s permission. Practically: secure the area, photograph everything immediately (photos taken during rescue are legitimate and invaluable), and hold equipment as-is until released.

3. Investigate and document. The employer must investigate and prepare a report — retained and available. This is where investigation quality matters: a report that concludes “worker error, retrained worker” survives neither an officer’s review nor a civil claim. Root causes, contributing system factors, corrective actions with owners and dates.

The separate clock: WCB

Workers’ compensation reporting is a parallel obligation with its own deadline — in Alberta, an employer must report a work injury to WCB within 72 hours when it meets WCB’s criteria (time lost, medical treatment beyond first aid, etc.). OHS notification does not satisfy WCB, and vice versa. Track both.

And below all reporting thresholds, remember the quiet duty from the first aid rules: every injury treated must land in the first aid record. Those records are both a legal requirement and your leading-indicator data.

Deciding at 2 AM

The failure mode isn’t ignorance — it’s that the person on scene at 2 AM has never seen the decision tree. What works:

1. A one-page flowchart in every supervisor’s truck and phone: what happened → report to OHS? → preserve scene? → who calls whom.
2. Pre-assigned roles: who calls OHS, who calls the family, who photographs, who starts the WCB clock.
3. A reporting system that carries the logic. Vigil’s incident module runs the regulatory determination for your jurisdiction on the facts entered, timestamps the notifications, and opens the investigation with the scene-preservation checklist attached — so the 2 AM decision is guided, recorded and defensible.

The companies that handle serious incidents well aren’t lucky — they rehearsed. Put the drill in your emergency response plan and run it like a fire drill, because that’s what it is.