Empower Employees to Prevent Accidents

Two employees were welding in a pit at the base of an elevator shaft. The pit was less than 5 feet deep and measured 12 feet by 18 feet across. The floor of the pit could be reached only by ladder—a permanent iron ladder attached to one wall, a straight ladder leaning up against another wall, or a wooden stepladder, which at this point stood in the center of the pit.

About 10 days earlier, a piston designed to power the elevator had been installed in a 72-foot deep shaft drilled into the pit’s base. To protect the piston from corrosion, the shaft had been lined with PVC pipe.

PVC primer and liquid cement were used to assemble the sections of the pipe. Both substances contained flammable solvents that produced vapors 2.5 times heavier than air.

While the two employees were welding, flammable vapors that had collected at the bottom of the pit ignited, causing an explosion that blew the PVC pipe out of the shaft. The force of the explosion threw one employee against a wall, causing multiple leg injuries. The other worker, who was also thrown against a wall by the blast, temporarily lost hearing in one ear.

The explosion also cut the wooden ladder in half, blocking access to the permanent iron ladder. Somehow in the dark the two injured workers managed to stumble to the remaining ladder and escape from the pit.

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OSHA Cites Employer

During the OSHA investigation of the accident, it was revealed that neither employee had been trained to work in a confined space, which was how the OSHA compliance officer defined the elevator pit.

Lacking training, the employees had failed to test the air in the pit for hazardous vapors. They had no idea what a dangerous situation they had walked into.

The employer was cited and fined for failure to train.

The employer appealed the citation in court, claiming the pit wasn’t really a confined space.

But the federal appeals court ruled that the pit was indeed a confined space. That being the case, the employer was obliged to provide safety training required by OSHA’s confined space regulation to any employee entering the pit, which the employer had failed to do.

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Case Comment

No employee should ever be sent into a confined space—or given any other job that involves safety or health hazards—without proper training. This is true whether the training is required by a specific OSHA regulation, by the General Duty Clause of the OSH Act, which requires employers to protect employees from "recognized hazards," by consensus standards, or by normal safe operating procedures.

The untrained workers in this case were lucky to survive. Other workers who were not trained properly concerning job hazards and accident prevention have not been so fortunate.

Tomorrow, we’ll present another true story that emphasizes the necessity of accident prevention training for all employees who face hazards on the job.