OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #170245096
TRENCH BOX,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,SHORING,SLOPING,BURIED,CAVE-IN,CONTUSION
Event description
Employee injured in trench cave-in
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was working in a 28 ft long by 12 ft deep trench that was by 2 1/2 f t wide at the base. He entered the trench by a ladder to move small dirt clods a nd had been down for approximately 1 minute when the north side caved in. Employ ee #1 was buried under approximately 8 ft of loose, dry dirt for between 15 and 25 minutes. Rescue crews used a backhoe and hand shovels to dig him out. Employe e #1 sustained only minor contusions. The trench was neither sloped nor shored, and the employer did not have a trench box on the site; only the north side had a slight incline at a ratio of approximately 1/2 to 1.
Victim
-
#1 Non-hospitalized injury Age 32 M
- Nature of injury
- 3
- Part of body
- 14
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 599
- 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.