Excavation entry

No way anyone should be diving into an excavated trench 10' deep without safety walls installed.

Reflectorless? Extra setups and extra time.

Client provides scaffolding? They won't want to do that.?ÿ

Larry's got it; get the client to provide necessary safety measures, and you will be happy to meet their requirements.

I have run into this before. The excavator/foundation sub wants some thing that I did not feel was safe. In those cases, we almost always were contracted to the owner of the lot (builder). My experience is that those companies are as interested in safety (or perhaps not getting fined/sued/shut down) as we were.?ÿ

The key is to make sure the right people are in the loop. Being between the excavation and the solid foundation wall is a very dangerous place, and there should be another way to make it work.

Trenching and Excavation Safety (osha.gov)

Maybe just trig an elevation to the top of the wall with a reflectorless shot and compute a measure down for a virtual mark and maybe hit it with a paintball gun or something? Having someone physically go down into a 10' deep unsupported trench is a definite no-no.?ÿ

This must be residential work. I'm on a lot of commercial sites where everyone has the right to stop work on a project if conditions are not safe. Also if an inspector finds unsafe excavations the site is on stand down for safety meeting. There should be 4ft benches, ladders and a ramp on excavations.?ÿ

They have to have finish grade marked on the wall before they start filling? Why can't they get that after they get some dirt in it till it's safe to get to the final grade?

Posted by: @chris-bouffard

He obviously got hurt pretty bad, prompting an OSHA work related injury investigation and the firm paid a $10,000 fine for a $350 foundation location.

I think that maybe you are going to have to rethink your business model. If you won't allow your guys to go in the excavation or climb the forms to measure them then maybe it can't be done for the going rate. Somebody else will. So maybe this line of service is just too much risk for too little reward.?ÿ?ÿ

Posted by: @norman-oklahoma

Somebody else will

Let them.

Stand your ground.

Sleep well.

Posted by: @chris-bouffard

I currently have 6 field crews and we do a high volume in new residential construction.?ÿ With this comes completing foundation locations on a daily bases for multiple crews on multiple sites in open excavations where almost every unit has a 10' basement.

The contractors usually don't have much room to bench or slope their trenches back, leaving close to vertical walls.?ÿ At a recent crew meeting, I instructed my field guys not to work in trenches or climb/walk foundation walls.?ÿ Now I am getting push back from the clients.?ÿ They maintain that they need us to mark finished grading on the foundation walls and locate the foundation before it's backfilled so they can get their back fill inspections done.

My first priority is protecting my guys from falls or wall collapses.?ÿ My second priority is not getting tagged with heavy fines for violations of OSHA standards.?ÿ When I was with a former employer, a Crew Chief decided to walk a foundation wall and fell, landing on the concrete floor in the basement.?ÿ He obviously got hurt pretty bad, prompting an OSHA work related injury investigation and the firm paid a $10,000 fine for a $350 foundation location.

I'm curious as to hear howall of you approach this situation.?ÿ I have personally seen a pipe installer killed in a trench collapse not 10' from where I was standing while I was running the gun and can tell you that it wasn't pretty.

?ÿ?ÿ

Death happens.?ÿ What you have described is exactly how it can happen very quickly.?ÿ I worked with a fellow one day, then his boss sent that entire team to a different project and he died in a cave-in by mid-afternoon.

Iƒ??ve been in the same situation. I just told the contractor that Iƒ??ve already been fined ($10,000+) for staking in those conditions before and that if happened again my license would get revoked. Wasnƒ??t true at all but at least the contractor felt more sympathetic towards what I was saying since $$$ meant more than safety to him.

If you can't afford to do it safely for $350 you should consider charging what it will take to do it safely.?ÿ Tract home builders suck.

@holy-cow?ÿ

That's a bad deal.

I refused to go into those things and I got pushback from my chief and told him, "here, I'll run the gun and you go slithering around next to the forms and the triangle wedges they pin them together with and then let me know how you feel". We stopped climbing into the unsafe trenches and never looked back.

Dumb and diligent aren't the same thing.

Safety is all that matters, and if it's not safe why, and what are we doing there.

Yeah.?ÿ I'll walk from unsafe situations and have, even filed an OSHA complaint for an employer that was flagrantly violating the law. The call and letter they got from OSHA calmed them rtf down and after I was certain no one I was in charge of their safety around the site was solid, I left.

Forever.

?ÿ

@leegreen?ÿ

And trench boxes when no benches or slopes can be used.

Yeah.

I'm and have been a HUGE PITA for bully safety violators. Don't care either. Everyone deserves to go home after work.

@williwaw?ÿ

Waist/chest deep will kill you from vascular resistance and then the hypovolemic process when removed. Horrible way to die.?ÿ

@larry-best?ÿ

Screw them.

They can go pull a tape.

It doesnƒ??t seem that standard trench safety rules are applied to standard 8ƒ?? house foundations but maybe 10ƒ?? walls would be an issue. Walking a 10ƒ?? wall would definitely be a no go even after backfill you would be within a zone requiring fall protection you could potentially use a ladder or do the asbuilt reflector less. That being said there a lot of exceptions to the rules regarding residential construction vs commercial/industrial/government construction.

The preventable death of an employee haunts me still after 30+ years. It changed my perspective on safety forever.

I can't change what happened then but I can hope that my experience might prevent someone else the heartache of putting themselves or others in harms way.