OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #709667
HELPER CITY
HELPER, UT·
Event description
Employee's back fractured in trench cave-in
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was sitting in the bottom of a 32 in. wide trench that was being dug for the installation of a 6 in. PVC sewer line/pipe. The trench was being dug e ast to west near the center of an asphalt-surfaced street. A backhoe was positio ned to excavate the material, which was mostly gravel, sand, and rock. (The area had previously been a river bed.) Employee #1 was pushing on the end of the pip e with his leg when the trench caved in and he was struck by the falling materia l. He was hospitalized with a broken back. According to a coworker, there was li ttle or no wall. It had fallen away, leaving an overhang of asphalt and exposing 12 to 18 in. of PVC pipe.
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 35 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 3
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 17
- 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.