OSHA Compliance

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