OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14562367
WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,SHORING,SLOPING,BURIED,CAVE-IN
Event description
Employee killed when buried in trench cave-in
Investigation abstract
At approximately 4:25 p.m. on April 14, 1987, Employee #1 and a coworker were us ing a shovels to grade the bottom surface of a 15 ft long by 8 ft wide by and 10 to 12 ft deep trench before laying concrete pipe. They were almost done when a portion of the southeast wall caved in, partially burying both workers. A third coworker jumped in to rescue them, but a second cave-in completely covered Emplo yee #1, and partially buried the two coworkers. Employee #1's dead body was pull ed out 30 minutes later. The walls of the trench were almost vertical and not sh ored.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 37 M
- Nature of injury
- 2
- Part of body
- 4
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 18
- 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.