250+ workers have died in preventable trench cave-ins over a decade, probe finds

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Every day across the country, scores of workers toil in trenches, the glorified ditches you see along the highway at large construction sites and new home builds. Without the proper systems in place, those trenches can collapse in an instant, burying those workers alive. A joint investigation by NPR, Texas Public Radio and the program 1A finds that more than 250 workers have died in trench cave-ins over the last decade. Those deaths were preventable, experts say. And the federal regulatory and enforcement agency in charge of workplace safety, OSHA, has done little to hold companies accountable. NPR's Robert Benincasa reports.

ROBERT BENINCASA, BYLINE: Ken Bruneau hasn't been back here on the street in Boston's South End since 2016. But he remembers what took place that October day as though it were yesterday. Bruneau was a carpenter who was working inside a townhouse in this upscale neighborhood when he stepped outside for a quick cigarette. While he was standing near the edge of a trench where two men were working, the unimaginable happened.

KEN BRUNEAU: I'm looking down, and the guys are down there working. And next thing you know, I seen part of the trench engulf them from the waist down real quick, like, whoosh.

BENINCASA: Seconds later, a fire hydrant breaks loose, flooding the street and the trench with so much water and mud that it smothered the two workers, Kelvin Mattocks and Robbie Higgins.

BRUNEAU: I knew that they were done.

BENINCASA: Being buried alive in a collapsed trench isn't a common way for a construction worker to die, but it might be the most avoidable. Yet these deaths are not being prevented. NPR, Texas Public Radio and 1A found more than 250 deaths in trench cave-ins nationwide over the last decade. Mattocks and Higgins were two of the victims. Jordan Barab was deputy assistant secretary for OSHA during the Obama administration.

JORDAN BARAB: There's no reason, really, that any worker in this country should be dying in a collapsed trench.

BENINCASA: Trenches, which are ditches that are deeper than they are wide, are often needed to install or repair pipes, cables and utility lines. But Barab says they can be deadly.

BARAB: One cubic yard of soil weighs 2 to 3,000 pounds, and most trench collapses involve three to five cubic yards of soil, so you can do the math. If you get caught in a trench collapse, it's very likely you're going to die, either being crushed or suffocated or both.

BENINCASA: NPR and our partners reviewed hundreds of pages of OSHA inspection reports, court records, personnel files and other documents and analyzed 10 years of the agency's workplace accident data. We found that lives were lost because employers failed to follow government rules for making trenches safe. Regulation and enforcement from OSHA weren't effective. Aubrey Fryday blames OSHA.

AUBREY FRYDAY: OSHA needs to do more than what they're doing.

BENINCASA: Friday's son, Nathan, died in a trench collapse in August 2016 in Lockhart, Texas. He was 22. OSHA found that Texas-based Mercer Construction violated its regulations and fined the company. But Friday says the federal agency needs to be more aggressive in protecting workers.

FRYDAY: It shouldn't take a death for them to act. They're just all getting too lazy and sitting behind their desks and doing nothing.

BENINCASA: OSHA officials dispute that. Scott Ketcham, the agency's director of construction, says OSHA goes after employers who break the rules.

SCOTT KETCHAM: We're doing everything we can to protect workers every day for America. When we find them, we cite them, and when we cite them, we hold them accountable.

BENINCASA: But our investigation found that OSHA doesn't always hold employers accountable when a worker dies and a trench collapse. For instance, Kevin Otto, who employed Mattocks and Higgins, still hasn't paid the $1.4 million owed to OSHA since 2016. When NPR pointed out the agency's own records show that Otto failed to pay, Ketcham says his agency tried.

KETCHAM: We attempted through debt collection to get penalties from that individual. I'm not going to comment on Mr. Otto.

BENINCASA: The incident involving Maddox and Higgins marked the third time that OSHA cited Otto for violating trenching regulations. He was cited once in 2007 and again in 2012, and he isn't alone. We found at least nine other businesses where workers died from a trench cave-in that were previously cited for trench violations. Ketcham, the OSHA official, acknowledged that his agency needs to do more to hold companies accountable when they repeatedly violate trenching regulations.

KETCHAM: And that is a top priority right now.

BENINCASA: At the heart of many of these cases is a trench box, a system where metal plates press against the soil walls of a trench to stabilize them, and cross beams, known as spreaders, hold the plates apart. There wasn't one in place when Jack Martin died in 2019. He was buried alive while installing a sewer line behind a shopping center in Houston. His father, Larry Martin, says money was the problem.

LARRY MARTIN: Two days prior before it happened, he told me - he says, Dad - he says, you know, I've already asked them a couple of times, and they told me, no, they're too expensive.

BENINCASA: Protective equipment like trench boxes are legally required by OSHA for any trench deeper than five feet. After Martin's death, OSHA fined his employer, Best Plumbing LLC, nearly $19,000. The agency later reduced that to $11,000. Company owner Vincent Horvath declined to comment on the incident. OSHA conducts between 1,500 and 2,000 trenching inspections annually. That's 5 to 7% of all workplace inspections, and that includes visiting sites after a worker has died. The agency has 840 compliance officers to handle all work sites in the country, between 7 and 9 million of them, Ketcham says. Jordan Barab, the former OSHA official, says it's a matter of resources.

BARAB: It would take 190 years for OSHA to inspect every workplace just once. So the likelihood of any employer seeing an OSHA inspector, unless one of their workers dies or there's a serious incident, is very low.

BENINCASA: Kelvin Mattocks, one of the two workers killed in Boston, was laid to rest across from where he grew up in Eastern North Carolina. His older sister, Melinda Mattocks-Ushry, walks over to his grave behind a simple country church.

MELINDA MATTOCKS-USHRY: This is his resting place. This is where he was raised in the church here. His wife let us bring him home. She knew this is where he would want to be. It hurts so bad.

BENINCASA: She often thinks about how things could have been different had her brother's employer provided the required safeguards.

MATTOCKS-USHRY: There should have been protection for these guys. There should have been a way out of that hole for these guys. I would love for someone to do something about people that's going to work to do an honest day work be protected while at work.

BENINCASA: Kelvin Mattocks' employer, Kevin Otto, was convicted of two counts of manslaughter and sentenced to two years in a Suffolk County jail in 2019. Since his release, he has started a new business cleaning drains. His criminal case was unprecedented for Boston. Prosecutor Lynn Feigenbaum told NPR that she had to convince a grand jury and a judge that the fatal trench collapse was more than just an industrial accident. It was a crime. Robert Benincasa, NPR News.

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