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Millions of federal dollars are pouring into infrastructure projects nationwide. That means thousands more construction workers will install sewer lines, pipes or cables, and trenches dug deep into the ground. Experts say, though, that there have been at least 250 preventable deaths over the last decade from trenches collapsing on top of those workers. Texas Public Radio's Josh Peck looked into what's being done to protect them.
JOSH PECK, BYLINE: Forty-one-year-old plumber Jack Martin was working in a trench, installing a sewer line behind a Houston shopping center when it collapsed, burying him alive. He had repeatedly asked his employer to get trench boxes - metal boxes that could keep the trench walls stable, and prevent soil from falling on top of workers if a trench caved in.
LARRY MARTIN: Two days prior before it happened, he told me, he said, Dad - he said, you know, I've already asked them a couple of times, and they told me, no, they're too expensive.
PECK: Larry Martin is Jack's father. He says having a trench box could have saved his son.
MARTIN: And I told him, I said, well, you know, if it's $1 million, $1 million, to me, is worth the life of somebody else.
PECK: After Martin's death, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, cited and fined his employer for not having a protective system. Working in a trench can be hazardous, so much so that OSHA requires companies to have a protective system - such as a trench box - for any trench deeper than five feet. The agency also requires employers to have an experienced supervisor on site with authority to stop work in a trench if they consider it unsafe.
CANDELARIO VAZQUEZ: That system is the strongest system for entering and exiting a trench.
PECK: Candelario Vazquez is a health and safety organizer at Workers Defense Project in Austin, and has trained workers in OSHA safety courses. Because of the different ways that soil types, weather and other issues can affect the stability of a trench, they can collapse without warning, and that leaves little time for workers to escape.
VAZQUEZ: About one cubic yard - it weighs as much as a ton, like, as much as a car. And falling down on you that fast, one of the things that happens is you get hit by it, you can get crushed.
PECK: Nathan Fryday was 22 when he was killed in a trench collapse in Lockhart, Texas in 2016. Bryan Fryday says his son, who rarely questioned authority, asked his employer about the lack of a trench box just days before his death.
BRYAN FRYDAY: He had told the foreman that, hey, it's unsafe. We need a trench box. The soil's kind of shady. You know, sure enough, when it got him, the fire department showed up, and it took them, golly, a long time to get him out because, you know, they didn't have anything to keep all the dirt and stuff away.
PECK: Fryday says companies who violate worker safety laws need to be punished more severely.
FRYDAY: Companies should responsible and fearful, like, OK, this is what we have to do to make it safe. We want to be safe.
PECK: Of the more than 250 workers who died in trench collapses in the U.S. in the last decade, only 11 employers were charged criminally. None were in Texas. David Michaels is a professor at George Washington University's Milken Institute of Public Health in Washington, D.C. He's also a former OSHA assistant secretary. He says that the agency could turn to criminal prosecutions more when trench deaths happen.
DAVID MICHAELS: If employers see that an employer is sent to jail because a worker was killed in a trench, that will have a much bigger impact on them than fear of an OSHA fine.
PECK: The federal laws on the books that created safety guidelines for trench workers are strong, Michaels says. What's needed is stiffer enforcement of those laws. And until OSHA does a better job, workers will continue to suffer from deadly, but preventable trench collapses. For NPR News, I'm Josh Peck in San Antonio.
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