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 #736140

PINNED,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,UNSTABLE SOIL,BURIED,CAVE-IN

Event
PINNED,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,UNSTABLE SOIL,BURIED,CAVE-IN
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
736140
Report ID
452110

Event description

Employees injured in trench cave-in

Investigation abstract

A construction company was laying gravity flow sewer lines (14,000 ft 8 and 10 i es that employees work inside the trench box at all times. n. PVC pipe). Employees #1 and #2, laborers, were working inside a trench box. W hile the foreman was away from the site for a few minutes to pick up tools, the employees decided to get out of the box and lay a 13 ft section of pipe. As they placed the pipe into position, the side walls began to kick in. As they ran to the box, Employee #1 fell and was covered up with approximately 3 ft of soil. Em ployee #2 made it into the box and tried to shovel Employee #1 out, but he was s truck by a large clump of dirt that pinned him to a cross member of the box as h e leaned out over it. Both men were rescued and hospitalized. The company requir

Victims (2)

  1. #1 Hospitalized Age 32 M

    Nature of injury
    21
    Part of body
    18
    Event type
    2
    Source
    12
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    6
    Task assigned
    1
  2. #2 Hospitalized Age 45 M

    Nature of injury
    21
    Part of body
    28
    Event type
    2
    Source
    12
    Occupation code
    999
    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.