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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> In every instance, the deaths were preventable, experts say. All but one of the victims were male; the youngest was 16. In many cases, the companies failed to follow basic government rules for making trenches safe.

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.

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In my experience it's the workers, and it's machoism amongst the workers that creates an intentionally anti-safe culture where such cultures are permitted. Where I live they remove the angle grinder guards off and use 'safety squints' when welding. A friend had people working on his house, when I visited I made them stop their work and put the recently removed angle grinder guards form their new tools back on. I also and got them a chepo welding helmet. Not long after I left that day they took the guards back off and a young worker cut off a 1/4 of his hand and had to be rushed to hospital. My friend had a 'let them do what they want to do' attitude to the workers which thankfully has now been replaced with a 'safety first' attitude. Unfortunately too late for the kids hand.

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.

I second this. My day job is tech but I redid a rental property. I told the workers to wear a harness on the roof. I didn’t cheap out and bought nice comfortable equipment.

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)

You are proving this is a management issue. You took steps to address the issue. Fired people who didn’t listen. The fact they thought they could do it without consequences means they never got into trouble by management at other job sites. If your industry has a culture of not following safety procedures it’s only because bosses don’t enforce it.

There were still no real consequences. At least today, that crew has a several month long waiting list and will just shrug and walk over to the next job. You really need to get OSHA involved and for it to start costing companies money.

What does OSHA do in this situation? The roofing worker was fired for safety violation but can find work elsewhere.

In this example it isnt about the company.

Unless I read it wrong, OP fired the whole company/crew, not individual workers.

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?"

OP wrote "One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him." He fired the offending worker, not the whole company. Though in general I agree regarding supervisors.

Yes I fired the specific worker. It was my own crew, not a 3rd party company.

That depends on what level of the RCA you are looking at it. It can be simultaneously true that workers dont want to wear them and bosses dont enforce it. Understanding both facts is important for risk reduction.

Sure, in theory you are correct, but it misses the nuances of human reality.

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.

Yes, a top-down safety culture entails some level of bureaucracy and process overhead. That is the price that must be paid for jobsite safety. No one is saying there's a free lunch.

If safety is cheap but overcoming culture is expensive, at some point it becomes misleading (wrt ethics of participants, not correct course of action) to say the problem is that management doesn't care enough to spend money on safety, even if management is the only lever we have to fix the issue.

Telling people to wear a harness is not "covering every edge case so that everything grinds to a halt". It's just ensuring that the bare minimum is being done to prevent workplace deaths.

I think the interesting part of the comparison was the following two sentences.

I think it's a misleading argument because it compares things that aren't alike.

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.

I'm curious how liability works in this situation and when it ends? It sounds like you were operating as a general contractor. Were you paying the roofers salary or did you have a business to business relationship?

Relatedly, someone was telling me what workers insurance is 1% of construction costs for large infrastructure like building hospitals.

I’m technically an owner builder. I have a workman’s comp policy that ranges from 10-40% of payroll depending on the task. For a residential project I can definitively say insurance is way more than 1% of total cost. Eg for the sake of round numbers, let’s say labor is 50% of the total. If I take the absolute lowest percent of what I pay for insurance, we already are up to 5%.

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

That doesn't surprise me. I imagine that construction labor is a lower fraction of expenses for very large projects, as well as real risk, and overhead.

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.

The people with money become liable.

Thats not a very useful heuristic. There are numerous relationships that effectively shield liability, and many of these make perfect sense.

Is this "Latin machismo"? Look at the cyclists on the streets, I don't know where you live but everywhere I've been in the US at least half of them are without a helmet. It just appears that most people don't believe that things that have not happened to them are real. They don't grab a hot skillet only because they have done that and found that it's quite painful. They don't wear a helmet or any PPE because they have not experienced the things it's supposed to protect them from.

Cycling without a helmet may not be statistically safer. See for example "The Ultimate Question: With or Without a Helmet?"

>Cycling without a helmet may not be statistically safer. See for example "The Ultimate Question: With or Without a Helmet?"

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.

That could be, my point is that people can not be wearing a helmet because they think it is better not to do so from a safety perspective. They could be making a deliberate decision that they think is in their own best health interest.

I don't think the angle grinder guard issue is cut and dry. I sometimes operate mine without a guard in conditions where the guard prevents me from seeing the point of contact, which for me is a more severe safety problem. When I can't simply rearrange the work I remove the guard and take extra care. Such complex work environments should not be regulated inflexibly.

They never put the guard back on, you’ll never see a guard in use here. That’s why they consider it ridiculous to use one because no one else does. Never-mind the constant stream of people going to the hospital. Plus they use oversized grinders where smaller ones would be fine and safer even if slightly slower. And they take the guard off from the start so there is no guard while they’re still leaning.

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.

Seems like a decent use case for an endoscope. I've never used one with and angle grinder, but seeing into places where other tools are cutting/drilling when the tool is blocking the view has been great.

Or a mirror

I've used those in the past. The nice thing about the endoscope is that it has a light. They also tend to fit in smaller places and can even be taped to the tool.

its not just seeing what you're doing, the guard really does limit your ability to control the contact with the work. i'm all for PPE, including full face shields when working with cutting disks, but the guard is actually a real hindrance.

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

(c) is pretty nasty and isn't helped by the guard. (d) is trivially preventable by using fitting safety glasses. (a) and (b) result in cuts that are potentially bad, but not permanent.

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.

Most PPE has very real tradeoffs. Respirators are uncomfortable, especially in hot weather. Safety glasses get dusty and smudged. Gloves limit dexterity. Mortar mixer grates make it difficult to clean unmixed sand and mortar from the sides. Safety harnesses take time to donn and doff and limit mobility. It's rare that the safest procedure is the quickest and cheapest.

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.

Safety equipment can introduce new dangers too, both from correct use, and from refusal to use it

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.

> 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.

Had the pleasure of cutting concrete pipe with a 16" saw at my first job. That thing was scary as hell. Needless to say no one pulled the guard off it though.

This is not only a us problem for sure. Made two workers who where cutting pavement stones at our house wear safety glasses after i saw them cutting the stones with no protection. I don’t want it on my conscience if one of them goes blind due to a flying stone split.

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.

There’s a huge difference between avoiding PPE because you’re macho, and the company avoiding structural reinforcements in a trench. This whole thread is sidetracked on PPE. When someone chooses to do angle grinding without a guard, or chooses not to wear a helmet or goggles, they’re putting their own safety in danger. It’s dumb, but very different from the company making that decision for you. Companies should perhaps be partly liable when they don’t require and monitor PPE use, but they should be fully liable when the construction plan puts everyone at risk. That’s the company making bad/illegal safety choices for the workers, not the workers making their own bad decisions. Not installing trench boxes is like the company disallowing PPE on the job.

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.

This is an article about installing trench boxes, which is a decision made by the company, not individual workers, and has a long list of company execs admitting they didn’t follow the law because it cost them money. This isn’t that complicated and doesn’t really compare to individuals foregoing personal safety equipment.

Individual workers at job sites decide what they do, from how to build to what safety gear they use. Project managers and engineers give instructions but workers can and do ignore them and do whatever they want.

Yeah ok buddy, every job site everywhere is just anarchy. We have no idea how bridges and skyscrapers get built, really.

It seems like you didn’t understand the distinction between PPE and the project plan for trench boxes. In the case of PPE, the company is providing the safety equipment and asking workers to use it. Yes it’s true that some workers choose not to use ear plugs, glasses, harnesses, etc. (often because the PPE is uncomfortable.) In the case of trench boxes, companies have to keep the information away from workers in order to prevent their use, and the article cites multiple examples of that occurring. Trench boxes require company action and expenditure in advance of construction that is not up to individual workers.

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.

And yet the evidence of worker deaths due to lack of safety measures seems to imply that I am right.

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.

Maybe you’d know about subcontractors who don’t gaf or workers who are told to do something and they don’t listen.

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).

You are right about what? And why? The article clearly explained the worker deaths, and it was because company CEOs had chosen to avoid the mandated safety precautions (trench boxes) over cost concerns, and had chosen to not tell the workers about the safety requirements. They admitted it in many cases, and in some cases went to jail. The authors’ survey of trench fatalities found that company execs overwhelmingly had never planned to install trench boxes in the first place. There were no cases mentioned of trench boxes and heavy equipment being arranged and delivered, and of having individual workers instead decide not to install them. Are you aware of any, and are you accusing the article of some kind of bias?

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.

I think one of the examples from the article did say there was a trench box on site sitting next to the trench, but it had not been installed. I would be very interested in the root cause analysis of why that didn't happen. I agree with you that "individual workers" aren't deciding whether to install trench boxes or not - it's definitely a multi person task, and therefore should under the direction of whomever is managing the operation. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the ultimate causes is something like one to several ton mini/small excavators are good at digging 8-10ft deep trenches, but nowhere near big enough to lift the appropriately sized trench boxes. (This obviously doesn't excuse it, rather just pointing out a possible terrible dynamic for a smaller operation).

I went back to look, and it seems you’re referring to the case in the article of WBW construction, which OSHA deemed to be willful and repeated company violations, and the accident in question was triggered by the foreman (father of one of the deceased) doing a “side cut” into the main trench. They said there were trench boxes (plural) onsite that the company had chosen not to install, so root cause doesn’t seem like a case of workers thwarting the construction safety plan, or of too-small diggers. Further down the article also discussed the evidence that the company may have essentially forged a statement by the foreman. We are only getting one view here, but considering that OHSA fined them and claims willful violation, and that there is evidence of multiple wrongs in the case, it all seems to support the summary that the company is solely responsible and culpable, right?

> it all seems to support the summary that the company is solely responsible and culpable, right?

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.

Hmm, in the part you quoted I was only talking about the specific example that you brought up, of WBW construction, which was covered in the article. Your first mention of it was vague on details (and close but not quite correct), so I reviewed and found the details in the article to be explicitly making claims of company malfeasance and not really hinting at worker ‘group dynamics’ at all, which was your proposed alternative hypothesis. Go ahead and review if you like. I’m not sure why this suddenly got more sharply argumentative, but it seems to me like you’re misunderstanding my comment and making assumptions. Why is the suggestion that WBW construction is responsible for the accident doing the opposite - opposite of what? And what do you mean exactly?

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.

My brother has been in repair for a telco for almost 30 years. It’s a union shop and the company takes safety very seriously. They constantly send safety out to repair sites because the guys out in the field still jump in the hole so they can get their work done and get out of there.

“Trench work can be so precarious that OSHA also requires companies to have an experienced supervisor on-site with authority to stop work in a trench if they consider it unsafe”

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?

>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.

Honestly the ‘we care about your safety’ doesn’t work. It should be ‘nobody cares if you die on the job, but we’re going to send everyone else home with no pay’.

I’m confused by your reply. The law says you need someone on-site, not that a training class is sufficient. The part of my comment that you quoted was based on the idea of having someone on-site monitoring the workers.

I was highlighting the fact that it isn't simply about knowing the risks.

Right, so was I. ;) The point of the law (that requires on-site supervision) is to prevent workers from jumping into the hole without safeguards, regardless of what they know or think about the risks.

Two opposite statements

>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.

No they’re not, you ignored the rest of my comment and the context and (perhaps accidentally) cherry picked something to disagree with. The statement about not knowing the risks was made immediately after saying OSHA requires an on-site supervisor, which is what prevents people who don’t know the risks from jumping in the hole, and also what provides a worker safeguard regardless of whether or not they know the risks. Same point said two ways, same reason in both cases, and you agreed and repeated the same point I was making. Cheers!

I read your full statement, agreed with most of it, and cherry picked the part I disagreed with to comment on.

That is typical when someone disagrees with something.

You didn’t actually disagree with me or my point, you just misunderstood part of what I said. That’s a typical danger of cherry-picking, and when people do that it often gets called out and leads to tangential argument, and it’s one reason why HN guidelines push for generous “strongest plausible” interpretation in multiple ways at all times. Your actual point repeated and reiterated mine, so we’re in full agreement about trench boxes and the reasons behind OSHA laws. Perhaps violent agreement, as they say, but full agreement nonetheless.

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.

Here's a video of trench collapse with a trench box (0/10 made of bamboo- thanks for playing).

https://youtube.com/shorts/T4jfbUqMwAk

Regular video format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4jfbUqMwAk

Might be a tad optimistic to even call that a trench box. It’s definitely not an OSHA approved trench box in any case… ;)

If the existing procedures aren’t ensuring a safe workplace, the procedures aren’t adequate. Job site safety can add time, and it’s the company’s responsibility to ensure that there is no incentive for a worker to be able to speed up the job by skipping a step.

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.

My dad used to manage a heat treating shop. He came in one night to check on something and found one of the late shift workers had attached himself to the gantry crane and was flying around the shop on it. He was promptly fired.

To be fair, this sounds awesome to be doing yourself.

Often the safety equipment provided is the cheapest, most uncomfortable, version possible. Cheap safety glasses can fog up quickly or chafe, for example. The company does this fully expecting that it won't be used, but they can then blame the workers for not using it when something does go wrong.

I've read that workers are now refusing to wear masks for things like painting or sanding because of the peer pressure against wearing masks for Covid.

> I’ve heard stories about new guys who refused to wear safety glasses or hearing protection while working machinery.

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.

Humans are on average very dumb. They'll say things like "I've done this 100 times and never taken my eye out".

I work in a lab full of masters and Phd engineers and it is extremely difficult to get safety glass compliance above 50%. The company has mandatory yearly training, and leadership will discipline workers, but at the end of the day glasses are annoying and come off whenever supervisors arent looking

I've been gardening for 30 years, never any issues. Last year I pulled a broken branch out of a hedge and a bit I hadn't seen wacked me in the eye. Couple of hours later I was seeing flashes and a massive floater-like object appeared, a bit like a wobbling HUD graticule around my central vision. Turned out to be a posterior vitreous detachment which luckily settled down (mostly). Thank Christ.

I bought some airsoft goggles which are reasonably comfortable and non-misting, and wear them when doing any significant work, even just gardening.

It's a combination of many things up and down the chain. The work is dirty and grueling but even proper safety fails at times. Speed shoring trenches works but sometimes it doesn't for reasons that we don't know. Same for scaffolding and others. Construction is dangerous and those guys really do deserve the money paid to them.

An alternative perspective to making tools less functional for safety.[1]

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

This is no excuse. At least in larger companies, you have safety inspectors that routinely visit shops unannounced and will give you and your manager trouble if you’re not following procedures. They answer directly to higher up and can’t be pressured into letting it pass.

Your anecdotes are far less valuable than the actual reporting in the article.

> All but one of the victims were male

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.

So what. Fire them. They’ll wear the gear then.

Yeah, utilities have a constant battle to keep safety measures effective.

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".

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