OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14566533
FORREST ANDERSON PLUMBING SERVICE
PHOENIX, AZ·
Event description
Employee killed in trench cave-in
Investigation abstract
On the Tuesday before the accident, Employee #1, a backhoe operator and plumber, another trench approximately 125 ft to the east. They left at approximately 9:00 a.m. Employee #1 then entered the trench and began to install 6 in. diameter by 6 ft long sections of clay sewer pipe. At approximately 11:25 a.m., Employee #1 was walking away from the last installed piece when the west wall of the trench caved-in. He was killed. dug out an 8 ft deep T-shaped trench to reach and top the city sewer line under neath the street. Because of a 24-hour advance notice requirement, City of Phoen ix personnel could not top the line until the next day. Rain started on Tuesday night and continued all day Wednesday, so that the top was not done and the tren ch remained open until Thursday. Employee #1 and a coworker attempted to pump wa ter out of the trench on Wednesday without success, and on Thursday morning afte r the rain had stopped they used a front end loader to scoop out the water. The city employees entered the unshored trench and installed the T-top there and in
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 28 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 587
- Human factor
- 20
- 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.