OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14423669
EXCAVATION,PPE,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,VIBRATIONS,SHORING,UNSTABLE SOIL,SLOPING,CAVE-IN,UNTRAINED
Event description
Employee killed in excavation cave-in
Investigation abstract
At approximately 2:00 p.m. on February 12, 1990, Employee #1 and three coworkers avoidance, and prevention of excavation hazards; and the lack of personal protec tion equipment (e.g., hard hat). Soil samples taken by OSHA showed it to be an u nstable silty clay. At the time of the accident the weather was mostly sunny and 67 degrees. There had been no precipitation 48 hours prior to the cave-in. were installing a rubber flexible liner in a 12 ft wide by 20 ft long by 12 ft deep excavation. The walls of the excavation were vertical. The employees were h ammering metal stakes into the walls to hold the liner in place when the west wa ll caved in, burying Employee #1. Rescue attempts were unsuccessful, and the med ical examiner listed a fractured skull as the cause of death. Causal factors of this accident include unstable soil; the lack of shoring or sloping; the extra p ressure of the excavated dirt on the trench walls; vibration and cracking of the soil caused by driving stakes into walls; lack of training in the recognition,
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 21 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 18
- Environmental factor
- 6
- Task assigned
- 2
Codes shown verbatim from OSHA's accident-investigation database. A human-readable decoder is coming in a future release once the accident_lookup2 dictionary is loaded.