OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14570154
WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,VIBRATIONS,UNSTABLE SOIL,BURIED,CAVE-IN
Event description
Employee killed in trench cave-in
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was installing an 8 in. diameter water line in the bottom of a 9 ft deep by 24 in. wide trench that was several hundred feet long. The trench wall c aved in, burying him under about 5 ft of earth. Employee #1 was killed. Heavy ma chinery had been working approximately 30 ft away and a backhoe had been digging 10 ft away, at the end of the trench. This may have caused vibrations in the ea rth. There had also been a large amount of rain during the days prior to the acc ident, and the mostly clay soil had retained a lot of moisture.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 62 M
- Nature of injury
- 2
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 20
- 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.