104,543Records 70,659Employers 84,666Hospitalizations 27,563Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-09-30
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14542948

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

Event
WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,SHORING,SLOPING,BURIED,CAVE-IN
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14542948
Report ID
418100

Event description

Employee killed in trench cave-in

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 was in an approximately 8 to 9 ft deep by 2 ft wide trench uncoverin g the sewer line to connect a house to the sewer system. The owner of the compan y, who was on a John Deere backhoe/loader, model 6310AD, serial #358402T, notice d the wall of the trench start to give way and yelled to his employee. Employee #1 was completely buried when the wall collapsed. He suffered multiple injuries and died shortly after being rescued. The trench was neither shored nor sloped, there was no exit ladder, and the excavated dirt was piled at the edge of the ex cavation.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 51 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    4
    Event type
    2
    Source
    12
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    4
    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.