Trench collapses have killed hundreds of workers in the US over the last decade
text.npr.org
text.npr.org
Having known someone in the construction industry, I don’t think this is as simple as blaming “the companies”.
One of his frequent frustrations is getting workers to actually use the safety gear and follow the company safety policies. This includes properly securing trenches with the equipment they provide and mandate.
I’ve heard stories about new guys who refused to wear safety glasses or hearing protection while working machinery. Some of them so defiant that they had to be fired within weeks.
Obviously we need to harshly fine the companies that fail to provide safety gear or pressure employees to do unsafe things. However, having had a peek behind the curtain I think this issue is more complex than a simple failure of companies to follow guidelines for providing gear and procedures to employees. You really have to be on top of work crews all the time to make sure they’re actually following procedures rather than cutting corners.
I’ve worked in places where the safety procedures were clearly perfunctory (drove a forklift in a warehouse for several years, among other jobs) and if I had insisted on following the actual safety procedures I would’ve gotten endless grief from other employees for slowing them down. This is a management failure.
This sort of stuff can't be done bottom up as there is huge social pressure to demonstrate manliness to peers through risky activity. Only strict top-down edicts where such digressions are severely punished can take away that pressure; i.e. instead of using safety equipment it's because they're a sissy it's because their mean old boss is a sissy and they're forcing them to use it.
While OSHA can be a bit onerous it really does help to have an organization with teeth pushing safety culture. Instead of the conflict between the workers and their bosses 'stupid rules' it's the 'stupid rules' of some 3rd party.
They told me they were wearing it, but I came by unannounced and there they were on the roof with no harness.
I asked the supervisor what was up and they were doing the same thing to him. They would put it on then take it off as soon as no one was looking.
It was Latin machismo - the social pressure was so strong to not look goofy in a harness. The second time I saw this happen I wrote a firm zero tolerance letter which I translated to Spanish and hand delivered.
One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him.
(Not saying that reckless bosses aren’t an issue, especially in these trenching incidents where the safety equipment didn’t exist)
In this example it isnt about the company.
The company is responsible for workers that are improperly trained or out of control. If the supervisor can't enforce workplace safety rules, then the supervisor isn't doing his job, and if the company does not have process in place ensuring the supervisor is doing his job, then the company needs to be fined, too.
I can't believe we have this attitude of throwing up our hands and saying "Aww shucks, ya just can't convince those darn individual machismo men to do their job right. What can ya do?"
Flipping back to my day job, a counter example is security people covering any edge case so that everything grinds to a halt or lawyers over processing everything and stifling creativity.
The same people that might grumble about something being a management issue sometimes also complain about bureaucracy and process when things go the other way.
There aren’t simple trade off free answers to this stuff.
On the one hand, we have management telling workers to use safety equipment that basically everyone agrees is necessary. That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, it's about preventing people from cutting corners.
On the other hand, we have clueless interns sending questionaires to vendors, who then tell their own clueless interns to fill them with some buzzwords, just to be filed away without anyone actually looking at the completed form, in order to check some compliance checkbox somewhere.
These two things are nothing alike.
Relatedly, someone was telling me what workers insurance is 1% of construction costs for large infrastructure like building hospitals.
This is separate from liability insurance for say negligence if I got sued. I hope my umbrella policy would cover me here but I found in my situation it is a bit confusing. An insurance broker struggled to give me clear answers
In the conversation, they told me that their #bigco was able to save X hundred million a year by creating their own insurance company and requiring all of their contract builders to use it.
I believe you wanted to say "may be statistically safer" because the article you referenced tries to infer that helmets cause more accidents even though significantly reduce the number of fatal/serious ones. What if construction workers also want to be "statistically safer" in this sense?
It's trivial to see that PPE that prevents fatal and debilitating injuries is going to increase the total number of injuries as a person, who otherwise would have died or stopped participating in the dangerous activity forever, can go on and accrue more minor injuries.
I had a ‘see me’ for an exemption policy while I was there and they didn’t need one. They really were not doing the kind of work that needed it.
the most common injuries I have with grinder are:
a) using a sanding disk and buffing off some skin
b) running a cutting disk into my hand
c) getting the grinder caught into my clothing and pulling it into my torso
d) getting grit in my eyes
for me the real issue here is using grinder that are in excess of 5". sometimes thats necessary, but the idea of throwing around an 8" cutting disk with a > 1hp motor without a guard just makes me frightened thinking of it. i had a job where they insisted i use one and i just walked off. and cutting tools with blades, i.e for masonry. thats asking for real hurt. or those insane little chiansaws. just no.
As a society, we've decided that we are willing to pay the price to keep our workers safe on the job. But it only works if our regulators are effective and make the costs of noncompliance greater than the costs of compliance.
For example a hard hat might be fine, people generally are happy with that - they see the benefit, they see things falling, job done.
but then you add a ton more stuff which has decreasing benefit and increasing cost to use (in terms of comfort as well as time and dollars) and eventually the worker says “fuck it” and doesn’t even wear the hat.
there is always a balance to be had. We do the same in domestic life - we make motor cyclists wear helmets, but not car passengers. If we made all car occupants wear a helmet we would reduce head injuries for occupants in car crashes. But that would be ridiculous.
Effective helmets would likely need to be tethered due to their mass. I believe modern car race helmet are tethered to the vehicle frame.
OSHA standards are quite a low bar in general. An organization that is simply "OSHA compliant" is definitely not taking safety seriously. Moreover, OSHA is often far down the list of regulatory agencies that companies are worried about. For example, killing a protected bird species is far more likely to incur 6-7 figure fines and/or land management in prison than a workplace fatality.
That said, the situation with OSHA isn't particularly concerning. Most major companies are aggressively safety oriented. Even ignoring the legal liabilities of injured workers the fact is that, in the long term, unsafe working conditions are often less productive and potentially extremely damaging to capital investments. To illustrate, an accident at an oil refinery could easily run into the hundreds of millions in damage, in addition to an equal if not greater amount in lost production. The costs of settling lawsuits and/or fines for safety violations are trivial by comparison.
Nowadays, the greatest risks to U.S. labor is not from the likes of Kiewit, Union Pacific, Rio Tinto, etc. It is the small and under capitalized businesses. So, what can be done? Such businesses are already walking on a financial tightrope. If OSHA were to properly scrutinize such businesses even their limited fines would present a significant stress. Some people might retort that if a business can't operate safely than it shouldn't be operating at all, which is a fine. The downside is that all of those services will become substantially less competitive and more expensive.
I’m sure there’s gray area in between personal bad decisions and company bad decisions, but if a mining company were to operate a mine without reinforcing the walls, a mine collapse is 100% on the company, whereas if workers stop wearing masks while working and they get black lung after being provided masks and being told they’re mandatory, then it’s a bit more reasonable to say the workers made bad personal decisions, and the company didn’t do enough to enforce personal safety practices.
Trench boxes are the same as mine cable reinforcement - something the company is fully responsible for. Pointing at workers and/or talking about PPE safety culture just isn’t very relevant.
When the contractor rents or orders a trench box, delivers it to the site, arranges for the excavator, or even a crane for larger operations, and lays out the construction plan, there is no such thing as ignoring it. Just in case you missed it in the article, not only are trench boxes required by law in the US, a safety supervisor on site overseeing the operation is also required. The laws were written to prevent individual workers from being able to ignore the construction safety plan, and require company oversight. The only way it gets ignored is from the top.
Maybe you haven’t much experience working on job sites. Maybe you’d know about subcontractors who don’t gaf or workers who are told to do something and they don’t listen. Maybe you’re just unaware of the facts of reality? Utopian fantasy is not real life.
As GP said:
a safety supervisor on site overseeing the operation is also required
You don't want to listen? No more job. You don't need cooperation, you need authority with incentives to act (i.e. stiff penalties).
I already agreed with you and I’m aware that workers can make bad individual decisions, but that is not relevant here. We’re not talking about any and all construction safety, we’re talking about trenches and trench boxes. A few simple facts of reality that you might be ignoring that I’ve already mentioned are: 1- trench boxes require heavy equipment and advance planning; 2- the law requires a safety supervisor to ensure workers follow the plan. Neither of those is up to individual workers and cannot be undermined by individual workers.
To your broader point (that doesn’t apply to trench boxes), workers only get away with stuff when the company doesn’t care enough. The company is paying, and has all authority to monitor and enforce any and all safety concerns, should they be sufficiently motivated.
No. You're jumping to conclusions that you seemingly think support your goal, but actually do the exact opposite. From the legal perspective, the company being "solely responsible" would mean the owners and management of the company would get to declare bankruptcy of the company and walk away (free to set up a new company). Small construction companies generally don't have very many assets, so it would also hinder the families of the dead getting compensation. And from the perspective of wanting to prevent collapses happening in the future, solely blaming "the company" is essentially concluding "nobody's fault" - companies don't actually do things, people to do.
My comment was focused on trying to look at all of the contributing causes, which is generally how we improve processes so that these failures don't happen. There are many comments talking about the dynamics that lead individuals to eschew personal PPE. But with trench boxes, it's not really up to an individual whether to install their own trench box or not. So I was attempting to visit the group dynamics and incentives that affect whether trench boxes end up getting installed.
Companies do use bankruptcy to thwart legal actions all the time, which is crappy, but what bearing does that have on who is legally culpable for a trench collapse? And what is the alternative? You are suggesting OSHA should fine or sue individual workers? You are saying that companies are not solely responsible for installing trench boxes and providing on-site supervision? If not the company, then who is responsible? The law is declaring the company solely responsible, and I don’t see how it could be any other way, trench boxes are a company management decision. You even said “it’s not really up to an individual whether to install their own trench box”, so I’m double confused by your whole reply.
I think you’re talking in generalizations about the subtleties of the reasons that bad things can happen, and not about legal responsibility, and not addressing directly what I was talking about which is who should be legally responsible for meeting OSHA guidelines. Which, to be clear, isn’t exactly up for debate, OSHA already says who’s responsible. Anyway, these are two different questions, but for the purpose of assigning responsibility, OSHA doesn’t care if there are ‘group dynamics’ that lead to structural accidents. They put the company in charge because the company has to provide the supervisor and ensure safety. It’s simply not up to the workers.
Isn’t safety supposed to be on-site at all times? The point of the law is to prevent people who don’t know the risks from jumping in the hole, right?
I think this is too simple of a view. I think the interesting point is many workers dont want to use the safety features, and it isnt a simple matter of education. This is why a simple training class dont work.
Instead it is a matter of incentives, so you need to have someone onsite whos sole job is to make sure workers do it the way the company wants, not they way the the worker want.
>The point of the law is to prevent people who don’t know the risks from jumping in the hole, right?
>prevent workers from jumping into the hole without safeguards, regardless of what they know or think about the risks.
That is typical when someone disagrees with something.
Just to try to make this tangent more constructive and thoughtful and less argumentative, it’s true that my last sentence is incomplete when taken literally. In retrospect, it’s certainly not a perfect summary of the point of OSHA’s on-site supervision rule. Keeping people out of the trench who don’t know the risks is one reason to have a supervisor, other reasons include keeping people who do know the personal risks from being allowed to choose to accept them, because they might not know the collective or company risks, or because their risk tolerance is unacceptably high. Maybe a better way to say it is that the point of the law is to prevent individual workers from having the choice to take such risks. In any case, I’m pointing out that my comment could be improved by starting with “One point..” rather than “The point..”. I assumed the context mentioning on-site supervision twice made it pretty clear, but that’s on me, my bad assumption. And it’s not uncommon for me to realize my writing is not as clear as I thought.
Even when folks had recently been killed in the field due to basic safety equipment not being used, there would be people who would roll their eyes and bemoan the "red tape and bureaucracy".
This is just crazy. It's low effort to protect the most exposed body functions while using machinery. I always cringe when I see someone doing any kind of that type of work w/o eye protection. Even something simple like hammering nails can cause a chip to fly off and into your eye.
I bought some airsoft goggles which are reasonably comfortable and non-misting, and wear them when doing any significant work, even just gardening.
I assume this is simply a reflection of the construction industry and not specific to trenches? Most jobs that are dangerous are done almost entirely by men in virtually every country.
Handy when drilling a 5/8" hole through 10" of wood.[2]
[1]http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html [2]https://njarboe.com/chal/barn/barn4.html
> While those who violate OSHA standards can be criminally charged, authorities rarely brought charges. When they did, most offenders got off with a fine, probation or little time in jail.
OSHA regulations are written in blood and there should be steep consequences for those who violate them including criminal charges. Based on recent happenings[0], the Supreme Court is looking to target OSHA next. They may have denied to hear this case but the opinions speak for themselves. It is on the radar.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-rejects-chall...
Sometimes it takes a powerful organization to get redress from another powerful organization.
Typical tactics involve settling for whatever maximizes the $/hour the lawyer earns (e.g., they might take a low-ball settlement the first week instead of spending months on discovery to get to trial), and having fine print in the contract saying you have to pay for expenses regardless of the case outcome (and then racking up all sorts of expenses on your behalf, and perhaps settling for a value so low your cut doesn't cover the bills).
With OSHA regulations there is much less wiggle room. "They weren't using trench boxes, as required..." leaves much less room for debate.
You would get no compensation.
This is probably part of the reason bigger firms are often more compliant, also that executives are more exposed to personal liability as the number of workers grows, all else equal.
Those of us who sell work are also told not to be afraid to decline work isn’t safe (working on live electrical equipment that could be shut down to work safely, for example). We have a ‘no live work’ policy, but will do live work in certain circumstances where there is no other option (mostly hospitals), and the head of safety and the COO are both involved in pre-task planning and execution to ensure the safest possible methods.
We also have some certified rope access techs, those guys take their safety very seriously, to the point where they’re probably safer working off a rope than on a ladder.
My workers tell me they feel safer working here when the company explicitly says ‘your life is more important than our profit’ and provides the PPE, tools, and know-how needed to work safely.
FWIW, the bigger than construction firm, the more they care about safety. Big contracts can require a TRIR (recordable injury rate) below a certain amount. The big general contractors push new PPE into use, the most recent thing is hard hats with a chin strap to reduce TBI from ladder/lift falls. The strap does a better job of keeping the hard hat protecting the head by keeping it attached.
You see the real cowboy shit on residential job sites, commercial contractors live and die by their reputation, and unsafe job sites are a quick way to lose your reputation.
Truely an absent Andon cannot be pulled. Likewise the first safety is psychological safety. [0]
You made me remember the spring of 2000, the first time when I worked for a company that actually thought that way.
(edit: worked for some good companies before that as well, but what I mean is before that, security was always either up to the individual.)
I got scolded for working without proper gear, and after a couple of issues (tiny rebar splinter in the eye, later a speck of concrete in the eye, both happening despite wearing mandatory eye protection) I suddenly realized I had my manager hanging over me to try to figure out if there was something that could be improved in the work flow.
I loved working there, they paid very well, and here is the thing that looked crazy at the time but is obvious now: they had one of the best bottom lines in the city.
It all started with their new CEO in the 80's who didn't want to talk about profits at Investor Day, and instead circled back to safety and the employees who weren't able to go home the same way they went to work.
https://davidburkus.com/2020/04/how-paul-oneill-fought-for-s...
Even now safety gets mentioned in their earnings calls. https://investors.alcoa.com/financials/quarterly-earnings/de...
Presumably, as with all other federal agencies, all OSHA regulations not specifically encoded into the law by congress are moot, and can only be re-established via lengthy and expensive litigation, where judges (instead of domain experts) will set the technical standards.
The house next to me had a gas leak, and PG&E dug about six feet down to fix it (judging by the workers standing in the bottom). I didn't see any protective walls in there.
In your case, the trench would be 30’ wide with a gradual slope down to 6’ depth from either side.
Here’s an OSHA guide to working safely in trenches and excavations, page 12 of the pdf shows how to safely slope a trench: https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/osha22...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uLs1_8yohb8
The trench collapses right after the OSHA inspector tells them they can't be in there without shoring. Nobody was hurt, but it was a great lesson.
While it wouldn’t be perfect, it seems like submitting video evidence that the trench is properly secured would encourage more safety.
No video sent, no one gets paid. This would ensure everyone on the job site complies with safety rules. Each worker would be incentivized to send their own video proof reducing claims of technology failure.
You’ve seen these on the side of the road and now you know what they are for.
I wish that there was a much stronger enforcement culture in the US around dangerous work.
Elsewhere in this discussion/thread, some speculate that "masculinity" is the main culprit (i.e. not company's fault); certainly ego factors in, but few employees ignore safety rules when companies properly penalize non-compliance.
"Safety third" still allows for working environments which don't kill/fire employees over time-saving stupidity.
(The obvious issue with doing it that way is that someone will a tool or the pipe will get snagged or whatever, and then someone will go down to fix it without bothering to order + install the shoring.)
Example using the sound bite - https://www.tiktok.com/@seancallahan187/video/70942927842066...
It's a high level of education, knowing about shoring a trench and making jokes about it.
Compared to pre-internet society or the can't cope with change part of society who doesn't use TikTok or know how to shore a trench.
And yes, I'll jump in a deep un-shored trench to save time for a quick fix, but like all things it's a massively reduced risk compared to working in it all day that some places still do. As this article implies, men are expendable and it's mostly blue collar men who bear that brunt at work. If it was nurses being killed on the job it would be a different story. (The dangers of nursing are around shift work which kills but not at work)
I know that it's cool to think that the 'olds' who aren't on tiktok don't know anything.
Troo fact: OSHA rules were invented before tiktok even existed.
"Word of mouth" has existed for as long as language has. TikTok is just the newest medium to convey this absolutely ancient human process.
> And yes, I'll jump in a deep un-shored trench to save time for a quick fix
So.. you know how to use TikTok, you've seen the danger, yet you remain intentionally oblivious to it? Your pride is worthless. Your life is priceless. Please be smarter.