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Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14566749

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

Event
WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,SHORING,BURIED,CAVE-IN
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14566749
Report ID
950411

Event description

Employee killed in trench cave-in

Investigation abstract

At approximately 3:30 p.m. on February 11, 1986, Employee #1 came out of a 42 in . diameter concrete sewer line into a 6 ft 5 in. wide by 8 ft high by 20 ft long trench box that was being skidded under an existing 6 in. water line crossing t he trench. The trench was 7 ft wide by 17 ft deep. An additional 4 ft high secti on had already been removed from the top of the trench box to allow it to pass u nder the water line. This exposed 9 ft of unshored wall above the 8 ft high bott om trench box section. The approximately 45 ft long south wall of the trench cav ed in, burying Employee #1. He was killed.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 59 M

    Nature of injury
    2
    Part of body
    5
    Event type
    1
    Source
    42
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    6
    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.