A four-year-old girl had a close call at a Halifax-area gym when a large sheet of drywall and a metal stud fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing her.

Crystal Mason says she and her husband drop their children off at their local gym’s daycare centre when they work out, but they didn’t make it that far on Monday.

“When I arrived at the gym, the manager approached me and I could see that there was a commotion going on,” says Mason. “I didn’t know what it was about.”

She says their children were at the GoodLife Fitness gym in Tantallon with their dad when Quinn was almost hit.

“The next thing I know, a good size chunk of drywall had come down off the wall, about 20 feet up, and come crashing down and landing right next to the little girl’s feet, like within one to two inches,” says Jim Innes, who witnessed the incident. “It was very close. It could have been much worse.”

“It was blatantly obvious to anybody going into the gym that this was a safety hazard,” says Mason.

The girl’s parents say they aren’t trying to cause trouble, but they want to send a message about workplace safety.

There have been 13 workplace fatalities in Nova Scotia so far this year.

“It’s very upsetting to think that one of our daughters could have been one of those stories,” says Mason.

Her husband called the Nova Scotia Department of Labour immediately after the incident. They are now investigating, although they haven’t issued a stop-work order because they contractor agreed to stop working on the building voluntarily.

The department has issued an order to develop a hazard assessment and safe work practices.

“They will be reviewed by an officer and the orders will be lifted and work will resume only when we are 100 per cent confident that the workplace is safe,” says Scott Nauss, a regional manager of the Nova Scotia Department of Labour.’

Mason says there should be consequences.

“We need to be, everybody, at every level, an individual supervisor,” she says. “The company itself, there needs to be policies and procedures in place to make sure that people don’t get hurt and that people don’t die.”

Mason says she does everything she can to protect her children and she expects others to do their part.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Kayla Hounsell