"That OSHA guy snuck up and caught us out of the trench box for all of 30 seconds."

I said "people die going out of the trench box". I have no sympathy for going out the box and getting caught by OSHA. I investigated a fatality in in South Beloit in 1985 where the foremen went out of the box for 30 seconds and it caved in on him and he died. 100% preventable.

Case after case, OSHA has shown the trench collapses are unpredictable. In fact OSHA inspectors got out the workers in several instances before it collapse and killed the workers. See https://www.osha.gov/doc/quickaction.html

Even though he had been in the trenching business for 20 years, he had zero training on the OSHA rules in trenching. He had to take a trenching safety class as part on informal settlement agreement from a recent inspection. He had been cited repeats for $12,000. I said he got off cheap. I showed him an example of a contractor called Witt Plumbing. .

Witt Plumbing in NE got cited $70,000 each for no ladder access and no cave-in protection. They paid half the penalty. See
https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=NEWS_RELEASES&p_id=24279

One of the students said "do you want a $70,000 ladder citation" and laughed. You could have bought a cadillac for that price.

We went over the recent criminal indictments and said this could be you. People deserve a safe place to work and people send photos in to OSHA. You need to dig the trench safely, not only because it is the OSHA rule, but it is the right thing to do.

One of the students went on to tell us that he lost his dad in a 1982 bridge collapse in a preventable incident. Now he is a safety professional for a large nationwide underground contractor.

There are hundreds of contractors doing the right and safe methods every year when digging a trench. In IL, we went from a death a week on a trench collapse when I started in 1983 to the point maybe, one person dies in a cave-in a year. That is progress. If OSHA was not out inspecting these trenches, we would have lost over 1000 workers form trench collapses in the last 30 years. There is no excuse and no sympathy for those that want to cheat these minimum safety rules.