A trench box was in the excavation. The walls came in anyway, at 12 feet, and a worker ended up buried to the knees.
That’s one of fifteen incidents MIOSHA published on August 4 in an unusually specific eNews bulletin. Brian Paul, the agency’s Construction Safety and Health Manager, walked through the employer-reported referrals his division has investigated this year: roughly 40 of them between January 1 and July 13, reported under Rule 408.22139(2), which gives employers 24 hours to report an inpatient hospitalization, an amputation or the loss of an eye.
The List Is the Point
A 15-foot ladder fall producing multiple broken bones. A roofer who stepped out of an extensible boom lift without fall protection and dropped about 30 feet. A worker completely buried when a 9-foot-deep septic excavation collapsed. A concrete pump hose to the face. A cement bag that dragged a hand into a mixer paddle. A foot crushed by a 27-inch concrete pipe. A worker riding a lift facing backward into an overhead obstruction.
None of it is exotic. That’s what makes it useful. This is a free, jurisdiction-specific hazard inventory that drops straight into a toolbox talk, and the agency is effectively telling employers which fifteen scenarios its inspectors keep driving out to.
The two excavation entries deserve their own attention. One worker fully buried at nine feet. Another caved in at twelve feet with a trench box in place, meaning a protective system was present and did not hold. That’s an argument for competent-person reinspection as soil and weather conditions change, not one-time sign-off at installation. On large earthmoving jobs like the FM Area Diversion, where crews move 45 million cubic yards around the clock, conditions change by the shift.
The Body Count Moved While the Agency Was Asking
MIOSHA went public on July 28 after three trench collapses in two days, one fatal, and director Bart Pickelman framed it as a call for stop-work authority when conditions turn. The agency cited 21 work-related deaths at that point. By the August 4 bulletin the figure was 24. As of August 7 the public fatality table carried 25, including an August 1 death in Center Line where a 57-year-old laborer fell roughly 25 feet into a trash bin while pushing decommissioned equipment through a second-floor roll-up door.
Four in nine days, after the plea.
It’s worth being clear about what this document is and isn’t. There are no citations attached, no employer names, no penalties. It’s a newsletter, and the remedy on offer is a voluntary Accident Prevention Program and free consultation. But contractors working in Michigan should treat the 24-hour reporting rule as an enforcement trigger, because roughly 40 self-reports this year converted directly into division investigations of rule compliance at the time of the incident.
The same bulletin named Tarah Kile deputy director and flagged Construction Suicide Prevention Week, September 14 to 18. Nearly 6,000 U.S. construction workers died by suicide in 2022, and 186 Michigan men whose usual industry was construction died by suicide in 2023.