OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #605766
RANDALL W. JORDAN
STONE MOUNTAIN, GA·
Event description
One employee buried by trench cave-in
Investigation abstract
At 2:00 p.m. on October 6, 1988, Employee #1, who had been hired two days before , and a coworker were told to dig a trench next to an existing house for waterpr oofing the basement wall. The trench was about 8 ft deep by about 16 to 18 inche s wide. The dirt wall caved in, pinning Employee #1 against the basement block w all. He was buried up to his waist and rescued by the local fire department. He was hospitalized for one day for observations and then released. The coworker wa s not affected by the cave-in. The untrained employees, who did not speak Englis h very well, dug the unshored, unsloped trench next to a backfilled area. The ow ner/employer was not on-site when the cave-in occurred.
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 19 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 1
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 869
- Human factor
- 17
- 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.