105,313Records 71,083Employers 85,290Hospitalizations 27,770Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-10-31
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #709501

PINNED,WORK RULES,TRENCH,UNSTABLE SOIL,SLOPING,CAVE-IN,LEG

Event
PINNED,WORK RULES,TRENCH,UNSTABLE SOIL,SLOPING,CAVE-IN,LEG
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
709501
Report ID
854910

Event description

Employee injured in trench cave-in

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 was grading the bottom of a trench in preparation for laying a pipe when a section of wall gave way, striking him on the lower legs and forcing them against the opposite wall. He was hospitalized. By the time of the investigatio n, the sewer pipe had been laid, the trench filled, and much of the physical evi dence destroyed. The depth and width of the trench could not be measured, so the measurements as stated by a witness were accepted. Surface material gave the ap pearance of being average soil, which would have required a sloping of 1:1.

Victim

  1. #1 Hospitalized Age 45 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    11
    Event type
    1
    Source
    12
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    18
    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.