Cal/OSHA has cited a Riverside, California construction company $66,000 for serious workplace safety violations that resulted in the death of a worker when a 17-foot-deep trench he was in collapsed. Cal/OSHA determined that Empire Equipment Services, Inc. did not properly classify the soil and failed to correctly slope the excavation.

A blistering report on small farm safety, Samsung Electronics apologizes for work-related illnesses and a dire warning about the effects of climate change on human health. These were among the top occupational safety and health stories featured on ISHN.com this week.

The National Utility Contractor Association (NUCA), the Safety Ambassadors Club and OSHA will hold a Trench Safety Stand Down June 18-23. Participating companies will take a break during the workday to have a toolbox talk or another safety activity to draw attention to the specific hazards related to working in and around trenches/excavations.

Nineteen years is a short life, but that’s all that Kyle Hancock of Glen Burnie, Maryland will get. Hancock died, buried alive earlier this week in a 15-foot unshored trench. Rescuers worked almost 12 hours through a long, rainy night trying to recover his body.

The employee who died in a workplace accident Saturday morning at a chemical plant in North Carolina has been identified, according to WSOC. The victim, identified as 43-year-old Clint Miller, fell 10 feet into an open tank at about 4 a.m. during a loading operation while working at AkzoNobel in Salisbury. “He mixed compounds. He mixed chemicals,” said Clint’s mother, Sandy Miller.

An excavation contractor that exposed its employees to trench cave-in and other hazards is contesting the violations issued to it by OSHA – along with the proposed penalties of $454,750. An OSHA investigation found that while performing work on two municipal water project sites in North Dakota, Kamphuis Pipeline Company failed to:

An alarming leap in excavation and trench-related fatalities has made reducing them an Agency Priority Goal for OSHA for 2018. The agency plans to accomplish this by increasing awareness of trenching hazards in construction, educating employers and workers on safe cave-in prevention solutions, and decreasing the number of trench collapses.

OSHA’s FY 2019 budget request reflects an emphasis on compliance assistance, an increase in enforcement and the elimination of a longstanding safety and health training grant program – a move sure to draw the hire of some in the occupational safety community. The agency says its request for $549,033,000 for FY 2019 will allow it beef up its VPP initiative and restore 24 of the 33 compliance assistance positions that were lost in a five-year-long budget crunch.

His fellow workers could hear his voice – at first – then a construction worker buried in a trench collapse fell silent, and died. The incident occurred at a suburban Detroit worksite at 1:30 yesterday afternoon – although emergency responders were not able to recover the man’s body for four hours, according to news reports. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

A team of surgeons were flown to the site of a construction accident in North Texas earlier this month, in order to amputate the leg of a worker who’d gotten caught in a trenching machine.