OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #221556939
JUSTIN TAYLOR
CARTHAGE, NY—
Event description
Employee is killed in trench collapse
Investigation abstract
At 11:11 a.m. on April 20, 2023, Employee #1 was in a 6-7-foot trench, removing stone from the top of the pipe and remove the clump of dirt from under the pipe. The loose stone was difficult to remove, so the owner/operator went in the trench to help. They got the pipe to lay on the bottom of the trench. The owner got out of the trench and walked around the house to get back in the excavator. As he got to the back of the house, he heard someone yell the bank had fallen in. Employee #1 had a large section of earth hit him in the back and forced him face first against the trench wall, trapping him in the trench. The owner/operator and the other worker went in the trench to remove him. 911 was called. At 11:51 a.m., the employee was pronounced dead at Carthage Hospital. a clump of dirt from under a section of 4-inch coiled sleeved piping that was just laid down. The owner of Thirteen Colonies Construction was operating a Komatsu PC 128us to dig a trench for a daylight footer drain. The trench was 6-7 feet deep in the ground. A trench box was not being used and the trench was not sloped back. Coiled 4-inch corrugated sleeved pipe was being laid in the bottom of the trench by two other workers. While covering the pipe with stone, with the excavator, a clump of dirt got under the pipe. The clump needed to be removed from under the pipe. The two workers went in the trench to remove the loose
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 59 M
- Event type
- 1
- Occupation code
- 7010
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.