Forty-one-year-old plumber Jack Martin was working in a trench installing a sewer line behind a Houston shopping center when it collapsed, burying him alive, on Nov. 13, 2019. He had repeatedly asked his employer to get trench boxes — metal boxes that could keep the trench walls stable and prevent soil from pouring on top of workers if a trench caved in.
His father Larry Martin said Jack had told his supervisors of his fears about the lack of proper safety equipment days before his death.
“Two days prior before it happened, he told me, he said, ‘Dad, you know, I’ve already asked them a couple of times [about a trench box] and they told me no, they’re too expensive,’” Larry Martin said.
He said having a trench box could have saved his son.
“I told him, I said, ‘If it’s a million dollars, a million dollars to me is worth the life of somebody else,’” Larry Martin said.
At least 250 workers have died in what experts say are preventable trench collapses in the U.S. over the last decade, with at least 20 fatalities in Texas alone.
Trenches are excavations that are deeper than they are wide, and can range from knee-deep to 20 or 25 feet deep. Collapses can occur when the soil in the walls of the trench becomes unstable, either because of vibrations from machinery or vehicles, movement in the trench, or because of the type of soil.
Recent federal infrastructure bills like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are pouring billions of federal dollars into more construction projects nationwide, putting thousands more workers into these glorified ditches over the next decade.
Working in a trench can be hazardous, so much so that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires companies to have a protective system, such as a trench box, for any trench deeper than five feet. The agency also requires employers to have an experienced supervisor on site with authority to stop work in a trench if they consider it unsafe.
Candelario Vazquez is a health and safety organizer at Workers Defense Project in Austin and has trained workers in OSHA safety courses.
“That [trench box] system is the strongest system for entering and exiting a trench,” Vazquez said.
Because of the different ways that soil types, weather and other issues can affect the stability of a trench, they can collapse instantly and without warning. That leaves little time for workers to escape.
“About one cubic yard [of soil], it weighs as much as a ton, which weighs as much as a car,” Vazquez said. “And falling down on you that fast, one of the things that happens is you get hit by it, you can get crushed — even if you survive you can suffer a crushed chest.”
After Martin’s death, OSHA cited and fined his employer Best Plumbing LLC $18,892 for failing to have a proper protective system. That fine was ultimately reduced to $11,335. Best Plumbing’s owner, Vincent Horvath, declined TPR's request for comment.
Nathan Fryday was 22 when he was killed in a trench collapse in Lockhart, Texas, in 2016. Byran Fryday said his son, who rarely questioned authority, asked his employer about the lack of a trench box just days before his death.
“He had told the foreman that, ‘Hey, it’s unsafe, we need a trench box, the soil’s kind of shady.’” Bryan Fryday said. “Sure enough when the fire department showed up it took them, golly, a long time to get him out because they didn’t have anything to keep all the dirt and stuff away … it took them four or five times [to get Nathan Fryday out] because it kept collapsing back on him. That’s how bad the dirt was.”
Nathan Fryday’s employer, Mercer Construction Company, was cited by OSHA and initially fined $148,297 for failing to have a proper protective system and failing to have legally required points of exit from the trench within 25 feet of workers. That fine was reduced to $126,051.
Bryan Fryday said companies who violate worker safety laws need to be punished more severely.
“Companies should be responsible and fearful,” he said. “Like, ‘Okay, this is what we have to do to make it safe, we want it to be safe.’”
Much of OHSA’s ability to protect workers is reliant on Congress. The legislature decides how many OSHA investigators to fund, how much OSHA is allowed to fine companies, and what kind of criminal penalties the agency can impose on its own. But OSHA does have some tools of its own that some say it isn’t taking advantage of.
David Michaels is a professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health in Washington, DC. He’s also a former OSHA assistant secretary. He said that the agency could turn to referring cases for criminal prosecutions more often when trench deaths occur.
“When a worker is hurt or killed in a trenching collapse, OSHA should very much consider a referral of that event to a local district attorney who could take on the criminal case,” Michaels said. “If employers see that an employer is sent to jail because a worker was killed in a trench, that will have a much bigger impact on them than fear of an OSHA fine.”
Of the more than 250 workers who died in trench collapses in the U.S. in the last decade, only eleven employers were charged criminally. None were in Texas.
The federal laws on the books that created safety guidelines for trench workers are strong, Michaels said. What’s needed is stiffer enforcement of those laws. Until OSHA and Congress do a better job of enforcing those laws, workers in Texas and around the country will continue to suffer from deadly — but preventable — trench collapses.
