The dangers of soil excavation at building sites are known as excavation hazards. During construction site excavation, workers inside trenches and on the surface are at risk. As a result, protection measures against the hazards in the excavation must be considered.
Every year, roughly seven people die as a result of excavation labor. Many soil types are self-supporting, such as clays, but others, such as sand and gravel, are not.
Many excavations collapse unexpectedly, causing death or severe damage. Many of these mishaps occur in shallow mines. It’s crucial to highlight that while most of these incidents happen to professionals, they can also occur to public members.
In this article, we’ll look at the various sorts of excavation dangers that might occur during site excavation, as well as the precautions that can be taken to prevent accidents.
Why Is It Important?
Excavation and trenching are two of the most dangerous construction jobs. Cave-ins, falling weights, hazardous atmospheres, and dangers associated with the use of heavy equipment are all potential hazards.
Pre-work inspections can help to decrease hazards and the risk of serious harm. We should check the excavation, support, warning systems, access places, weather conditions, heavy equipment, and personal protective equipment (PPE) during safety inspections.
What Are The Common Excavation Hazards?
The following are the specific hazards associated with excavations:
- Side collapse
- Materials falling on workers in the excavation
- People and/or vehicles falling into the excavation
- Workers being struck by the plant
- Specialist equipment such as pneumatic drills
- The influx of surface water and entrapment in silt or mud
- Proximity of stored materials, waste mammoths
General hazards such as manual handling, electricity, noise, and vibrations will be present in addition to these technological hazards.
Apart from these, some of the most common excavation hazards are:
1. Dropping Loads
Educate your staff to be cautious when entering and working in the area; it will help them avoid being injured by falling items. There’s a chance the load can shift or collapse while your excavator clears debris, and accidental slips can happen even to the most expert operator.
It’s vital to define the work area when utilizing digging equipment. Your workers should stay out of the excavator while in use and any moving or stored material. Follow OSHA requirements for stacking or piling material away from the excavated pit or trench’s edge.
2. Bunker
The earth above can be dislodged by digging underground. Even if there is a plan to support the trench’s edges, a collapse or cave-in can cause injury to a worker. Trench cave-ins can result in death in some situations.
To shore up the edges of a trench, make sure you follow property excavation safety regulations. To make your trench safer for workers, dig it with sloping walls. Use hydro excavation to finish the task faster and safely get the waste out of the way.
3. Underground Utility Vulnerability or Loss
During excavation, buried cable, water, gas, and electrical lines pose a substantial risk. While site administrators can hope that the city’s paperwork will assist them in locating underground services, this isn’t always the case.
According to a chart or marker, your crew is in danger of injury if a line is not where it should be. Traditional digging equipment has the potential to puncture or damage a line before you even see it.
Consider using a vacuum excavator truck before relying on obsolete documentation at your dig site. One of the safest methods to dig around buried lines and pipes is this equipment. The removal of subsurface utilities necessitates greater care and precision than the removal of simple dirt or rubbish.
4. Airborne Pollution
When a gas line is ruptured, the air around your excavation site becomes contaminated until the gas company repairs the pipe and clears the area. However, gas isn’t the only danger to your workplace’s air quality.
Dust, smoke, low oxygen levels, and other gases can create a hazardous air environment for your employees. People in surrounding homes or buildings may potentially be at risk in this type of circumstance.
Conduct air testing before beginning the dig. Make sure your staff has suitable breathing apparatus or that the atmosphere is safe to breathe in. Using a hydro excavator can also help to reduce air toxicity.
What Are The Precautions To Be Taken?
To avoid these excavation hazards, we must take proper precautions. Some precautions to be taken include:
• Trench collapse can be prevented by pounding the sides to a safe angle or supporting them with sheets or patented support systems. As the project evolves, support should be installed as soon as possible. As feasible, ensure that the workers are qualified and experienced and given clear instructions.
• Excavated soil, plants, and materials should not be stored on the sides of excavations since loose stuff can fall in. Because of the additional weight, the excavation sidewalls are more likely to collapse.
• By erecting significant barriers around the borders of the excavations, people will not be able to fall into them. This is required if the excavation depth exceeds 2 meters; however, shallower excavations are suggested.
• Keep cars away from the area to prevent them from falling into excavations or surcharging and collapsing the sides of the excavation.
For this purpose, balks and obstacles can be installed, and they should be painted to be immediately visible. If vehicles must tip materials into excavations, stop blocks should be used to avoid overrunning the excavation.
• Allow for safe entry and exit from the excavation.
• Hazardous fumes should be taken into account. Excavations should not utilize diesel or petrol-engined equipment unless exhausts are ducted away or forced ventilation is used.
• Cable and/or pipe plans and service plans should be used to find subsurface services, which should be identified on the ground and dug as far away as possible. During the excavation process, use cable and pipe locators.
Mechanical digging should not be used within 0.5 meters of subsurface utilities. Spades and shovels should be used instead of picks and forks, which are more likely to pierce cables. Services should be supported once they have been identified and exposed.
New and current services should be permanently marked by placing permanent markers above ground and using appropriate tapes over the service to indicate the service type, depth, and route.
• Flooding should be avoided by installing effective ways of pumping out the excavations while ensuring that the pump’s outflow does not cause flooding elsewhere.
Conclusion
Although an inspection is necessary at the start of each shift, such inspections only require one report every seven days. On the other hand, reports must be completed after all further inspections.
The report should be finished by the end of the relevant working period, with a copy delivered to the excavation manager within 24 hours. The report must be kept on the site until the work is finished, then stored for three months in the company office that performed the job.
Preparing for and avoiding potential excavation dangers ensures the safety of your workers, and it also aids you in completing each task securely and on time. Your firm will expand if workers are kept safe, and jobs are completed more quickly (and accurately).