A trench collapsed on a construction site in Florida trapping a worker in a 15-foot-deep hole, authorities said.
It took nearly three hours for first responders to pull him out of the muck.
At just before noon Eastern time on May 12, deputies received a call after a worker got caught in a trench when it collapsed on a construction site in Cocoa, a city about 46 miles east of Orlando, a spokesperson for the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office told McClatchy News.
When the trench collapsed, the man fell in a hole about 15 feet deep and 40 feet wide, according to a news release from the Brevard County Fire Rescue Department.
Pictures of the scene shared by the fire department on Facebook show the man buried neck-deep in muck.
Responders worried as water started to fill up the hole, the spokesperson said, and the sheriff’s office dive team was called for assistance.
The rescue personnel faced numerous challenges trying to rescue the worker because of the depth and density of the muck and the difficulty in bringing technical equipment to the scene, according to the release.
“He was able to communicate with firefighters while all of that was still happening. I can tell you when they pulled him out of the hole though there was some excruciating pain,” David Walker from Brevard County Government told WESH. “The problem is every time they would pull the water and the dirt from the hole, it would immediately fill back in, so they had to use some crafty efforts to be able to dig him out.”
After more than two hours of extraneous efforts to get the man out of the hole, responders managed to pull him out at about 2:37 p.m. Eastern time, the sheriff’s office spokesperson said.
The worker was flown to a hospital. As of May 12, the man was stable but the sheriff’s office couldn’t provide any updates on his medical condition.
OSHA will conduct its own investigation to determine what caused the trench to collapse, according to the sheriff’s office.
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