OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #760108
TRENCH,TRENCH DIGGER,CAVE-IN,BACKHOE
Event description
EMPLOYEE DIES IN TRENCH CAVE IN
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 and two other employees were assigned to install an outside sewer li rator saw the north wall start to cave in and yelled for Employee #1 to run, Emp loyee #1 running to the backhoe turned around and was buried under 3 to 4 ft of soil and died at the scene of severe head trauma. ne at a single family dwelling. A trench was started at the side of the house an d made two 45 degree turns to bring it perpendicular to the street pipe. The bac khoe operator was digging a trench that was 10 ft deep by 2 ft wide at the botto m and 3 ft wide at the top in a straight line towards the street. Employee #1 wa s told to stand near the end of the recently installed pipe while the rest of th e trench was dug. The backhoe operator dug about 16 ft when he stated he didn't like the soil's consistency on the north side of the trench and started shaving the side of the trench when Employee #1 started approaching the backhoe. The ope
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 22 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 12
- Occupation code
- 585
- 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.