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The water and wastewater sector does not get the public attention that construction or manufacturing get. There are no skyscrapers and no front‑page industrial accidents for most of what utilities do. But this is the sector where I see some of the most preventable fatalities in my expert witness practice, and the failure pattern is almost always the same: the work feels routine, the hazards are invisible, and the rescue resources are nowhere near the people doing the work. A

Falls from elevation are the leading cause of death in construction. Every year. Every published OSHA Top 10 list since at least 2010 has put fall protection — 29 CFR 1926.501 — at the top of the cited‑violations list. The standard is one of the oldest, best‑known, and most widely trained in the industry. And yet, in the United States, a worker dies from a fall roughly every other day on a construction site. When I'm retained as an expert witness in fall fatality cases, the f

A cubic yard of soil weighs roughly 3,000 pounds. The average car weighs about 4,000. When a trench wall fails, it does not slowly slough — it releases in seconds, and a worker standing in five feet of unprotected excavation is buried under more than a ton of material before they can take two steps. That is why I tell every contractor I work with that excavation is not a routine activity. It is a controlled high‑energy operation with a regulatory framework that exists because

As a safety professional and expert witness, I get the call about confined‑space incidents more often than any other category of fatality I review. The fact pattern is almost always the same. A worker enters a manhole, vault, tank, lift station, or pit. Something goes wrong inside — usually a low‑oxygen atmosphere or a buildup of hydrogen sulfide. A coworker sees them collapse and climbs in to help. Within minutes, two people are dead instead of one. OSHA has been telling us

Heat stress, cold stress and excessive noise are examples of physical hazards . We conduct heat‑stress assessments, develop...

Workplaces ranging from hospitals to wastewater facilities face biological hazards such as bacteria, viruses and fungi . We assist...

As a safety professional and expert witness, I’m often called upon to evaluate workplace incidents, analyze contributing factors, and...