An earth-moving contractor's decision to ignore repeated safety warnings caused an Oakdale construction worker to be fatally crushed last summer when a 10-foot trench in which he was working collapsed, a federal safety agency charged yesterday.

		Graphic: Trench Safety

As a result, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Wagner Excavation Services Inc. and Wagner Development Co., which share office space in Coraopolis, for a dozen violations of safety law. Seven were described as egregiously willful and five were labeled serious.

The agency proposed fines against the related companies of $382,875, the largest ever for a trenching accident in Pennsylvania since 1970, when the act establishing OSHA was passed by Congress, spokeswoman Kate Dugan said.

Overall, this year's wet weather led to a relatively large number of trenching accidents and violations, Pittsburgh OSHA officials said.

Less than two weeks after the Oakdale workers' death, for example, a plumbing company employee working on a sewer line in West View was rescued after a five-foot trench he was in collapsed. Emergency workers reported the trench was unshored.

In the Wagner case, William Partin, 39, a father and volunteer fireman, was killed in the early afternoon of June 29 while installing a storm drain in the North Franklin Township community of Trinity Park. A co-worker walked away from the accident and was treated for injuries.

Even though the same unstable trench had collapsed earlier that day, OSHA said a safety device called a trench box that could have prevented Partin's death sat unused on the job site. The box is a metal frame designed to shore up trench walls and surround workers in the pit.

"They left it sitting there, never used it,'' Scott Novak, a North Franklin administrator, said of the box. "It takes a lot more time to put it in, take it out, move it, re-set it and relocate it."

Calls to the Wagner companies yesterday went unanswered.

Wagner Excavation Services and Wagner Development are two separate non-union companies that specialize in earth-moving. They were previously known as one entity, Wagner Development and Excavation, but were split in two about 1¹*₂ years ago.

On at least seven separate days in June, the Wagner companies are alleged to have allowed unprotected employees to work in unshored or unsloped trenches in unstable soil, facing the risk of collapse.

The Wagner companies have 15 working days to contest the citations.

By law, a willful violation means the employer demonstrated either intentional disregard or plain indifference to safety laws. A serious violation is issued when death of serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.

Frank Librich, assistant area director of OSHA, said the agency informed the Wagner companies about its trenching requirements last February when called to investigate a fire at a company warehouse.

After the North Fayette job was started on May 28 and up until the fatality, Librich said people whom he did not identify questioned the company management about why trench protection was unused.

"They were aware of it'' Librich said. "Management was always on the site."

In the last two years, trenching accidents have caused an estimated 50 fatalities in the United States, Dugan said. Preventing such accidents have been an OSHA priority for 20 years.

Robert Szymanski, OSHA's Pittsburgh area director, warned that contractors who jeopardize their employees' lives by failing to provide proper trench protection will be "dealt with to the fullest extent of the law.

"They will find it will not be cost effective to avoid the use of cave-in protection,'' he said.

Generally speaking, any trench five feet deep or more has to have some sort of protection with the exception of trenches dug in solid rock. A more shallow trench can also require protection if the soil is unstable.

Trenches can be shored up with a box or some other method, or they can be sloped to eliminate the potential for cave-ins.

The Pittsburgh OSHA office investigated 28 trenches this year between April and November -- OSHA compliance officers are directed to stop whenever they see a trench to determine if it meets the agency's requirements.

Violations were found at 25 of those 28 trenches, leading OSHA to file a total of 87 serious violations, two willful violation and seven repeat offenses with total penalties of $220,000. The other three trenches were out of OSHA's jurisdiction.