105,313Records 71,083Employers 85,290Hospitalizations 27,770Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-10-31
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14516546

EXCAVATION,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,SHORING,SLOPING,BURIED,CAVE-IN

Event
EXCAVATION,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,SHORING,SLOPING,BURIED,CAVE-IN
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14516546
Report ID
420600

Event description

Employee injured in excavation cave-in, later dies

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 and coworkers were building a retaining wall for a retention pond at uth end of the excavation.. a shopping center under construction. The job called for an excavation along th e wall's length. When the employees reached the south end of the wall, they were unable to properly slope the final stretch of the excavation because it was at the property line. They also did not think they could properly shore the approxi mately 8 ft 4 in. tall, nearly vertical wall of dirt.. Employee #1 and three cow orkers were tying rebar for the wall footer the dirt wall collapsed, burying Emp loyee #1 to his waist. He was taken to the hospital, where he died 26 days later . The primary cause of the accident was the lack of sloping or shoring at the so

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 57 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    1
    Event type
    1
    Source
    12
    Occupation code
    567
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    6
    Task assigned
    1

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.