Unprotected Trench Found at 7:20 A.M.

First 30 minutes, in order:

1. Clear the trench. Stop the crew, get both laborers out, and bar re-entry - physically if necessary.
2. Stop the excavation equipment and keep it back from the edge; no stockpiling, no machine working within the influence zone while the trench is open and unprotected.
3. Protect the public. The sidewalk is occupied and the trench is 7'-6" deep at the property line. Close or barricade and sign the pedestrian route.
4. Notify in writing. Text and email the excavation sub's owner and superintendent: work is stopped, the specific conditions, and that re-entry requires a competent person's inspection and a compliant protective system. Time-stamp it.
5. Get a competent person on site - the sub's designated person, or a GC-designated competent person if the sub cannot produce one within the hour - to inspect and classify before anything resumes.

Basis for acting on the sub's crew. You are the controlling employer. Under OSHA's multi-employer citation policy you have a duty of reasonable care to detect and correct hazards you know or should know about, even where the exposed employees belong to another employer. Your own safety program almost certainly says the same thing. Waiting for the sub to fix its own problem leaves you with the citation and the fatality headline.

Deficiencies and the standard behind each:

• No protective system at 7'-6". Protective systems are required at 5 feet and deeper unless a competent person documents stable rock. This is the top hazard: a 7'-6" trench in soil saturated by 1.2 inches of rain, with a spoil pile surcharging the edge and a water main 5 feet away that can saturate and collapse the wall. Serious to willful exposure, with potential criminal referral if anyone is injured.
• Spoil pile at 18 inches. Material and equipment must be kept at least 2 feet from the edge. Every inch closer adds load right where the failure surface runs.
• Ladder 42 feet away. Trenches 4 feet or deeper need a means of egress within 25 feet of lateral travel. At 42 feet, the workers cannot self-rescue and a rescue attempt becomes a second fatality.
• No competent-person inspection. Required before work begins each shift and after every rainstorm or other hazard-increasing event. No one has been on site since Friday.
• No utility locate. The location of underground installations must be established before opening, and the 24-inch water main and gas main mean a strike is a life-safety event, not an inconvenience.
• Pedestrian exposure at an open trench on a public walkway.

Ranking: trench collapse first, utility strike second (the gas main), egress third, then inspections, spoil, and pedestrian control. Note that the utility and egress items are cheap to fix and the collapse item is the one that kills people - fix the cheap ones immediately because they are what lets you put people back to work safely.

Documentation. Photograph with a scale and a time stamp before anything is moved: trench depth against the ladder, spoil offset, ladder distance, the unused box, the open sidewalk. Save the 811 locate record (or the absence of one) and the weather data. Log the stop-work time, the notification time, and the time the competent person arrived. Record who was in the trench and for how long. Do not let the sub backfill the evidence.

The delay claim. Deny it. The stoppage is the sub's own compliance failure, not an excusable delay, and the sub's contract obligates it to comply with OSHA and your safety program. A party cannot claim time for its own default. Expect the sub to argue that you overreacted; your answer is the 7'-6" depth, the spoil, the rain, and the water main.

Backcharge. Only to the extent the subcontract's safety and indemnity provisions actually support it, and only for costs you can document - standby labor, the closed sidewalk, the re-inspection. Safety-stoppage backcharges are frequently disputed and sometimes unenforceable, so pick the defensible items, put them in writing with backup, and keep them proportionate. Do not backcharge for the stop itself; backcharge for the consequences you can prove.

Also notify your carrier and your safety director the same morning, and confirm whether the GC's own safety program requires the competent-person designation to be in writing on site - if it does and it is missing, that is your own compliance gap to close today.