iamsafetygeek

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 drinking water...

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 failure pattern is...

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 trench...