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 #14557698

WORK RULES,TRENCH,UNSTABLE SOIL,SLOPING,CAVE-IN

Event
WORK RULES,TRENCH,UNSTABLE SOIL,SLOPING,CAVE-IN
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14557698
Report ID
653510

Event description

Employee killed when trench wall caves in

Investigation abstract

A customer was slated to have his water shut off. To expose the shut-off valve, a backhoe was used to cut a 32 in. wide by 7 ft deep trench in old river gravel soil. Employee #1 was in the trench looking for the valve when a wall caved in. He was killed. The trench walls were cut vertically.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 63 M

    Nature of injury
    6
    Part of body
    19
    Event type
    1
    Source
    12
    Occupation code
    694
    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.