down in fresno with Preston Pipelines using the Deere 450...been a Komatsu man for most of the last 12 yrs..In my opinion, the cab and air conditioning are better in the Deere, smoothness and speed are better in the Komatsu..Don't critique the trench to much, i'm used to using slope buckets that are 3/4 to 1...On this job we could only get the Engineering company to sign off on 1 to 1 slopes so i had to use a traditional bucket..kinda out of practice
If you would shut the doors just imagine how good the A/C would work lol. looks good, Pj
Looks nice work...Not seen a proper ditching bucket for years...
Looks like a good trench to me, neat and straight. Safe too, with the sides peeled back that far.
for reddot thats a sloppy ditch, they usually look like just trowelled concrete, straight as an arrow to boot. For the rest of us its awesome. It even looks like he grades his spoils as he goes...
i could show you some of my ditches that don't look so good..i just didn't take pics of them
however there is no way that is an osha trench. not to be a pia but i would post that picture with a man in the hole.
Please explain to us how this is not an osha approved trench? The slope is at a 1:1, a ladder is within 25 feet of the trench man, and the spoils are more than 2 feet away from the edge of the excavation. Soils at worst appear to be class B, no water in sight. Ditch is good to go, in fact, one of the safest I have seen in some time.
That's what I was thinking.
Double post. Delete Delete.....:Banghead :bash :Banghead
Looks great to me! Hmmm Same guy
Okay,.... umm, how would you have dug that trench?
as soon as he gets an answer to his thread next to this one, he will let you know...
let say this is a class b soil. i would place the man in the trench at 6' tall. from some simple scaling from the picture it looks like the trench is 14' deep. it also appears that the bucket with is about three feet. a one to one slope would mean the top of the excavation is 14' + 14' + 3' for a total top width of 31 feet. using scaling again based on the man's height i come up with a top width of about 26'. also i used Pythagorean theorem to determine that the vertical slope of the trench should be 22'. i counted the rungs on the ladder and found their were 19 of them from the bottom of the trench to the edge. at one foot per rung that is only 19' feet and their is not enough lay back on the trench. i will let you know where i am coming from here. at our company we do our best not to put a man in the trench. we also do our best if we do put a man in the trench not to publicize picture of this. we do not have any rock so we have not class a or rock trenches. we feel that when push comes to shove osha would not accept our field analysis of a soil and would consider our men to be unqualified. so we also do not allow any class b trenches. so, when i stated that this is not an osha trench i was automatically considering it to be a class c soil. finally, i don't feel that this is an unsafe trench. in my mind there is clearly a difference between an osha trench and an safe trench. i feel this is a safe trench but i still wouldn't go posting pictures of it. an osha officer will take the very same approach that i just took with this picture and find it unsuitable.
wow as long as an engineer signs off on the method of excavation and layback everything is fine. I think the trench looks great. very safe and well thought out. let's not nit pick someone for a nice looking job. now in Fresno in July with the cab opened up?? . If it is hot and dusty my guys stay buttoned up all day. utlilty crossings and such are an exception. once again nice looking dig, even has taken the time to smooth out the trench for his poor helper.
correction: i said the vertical should be 22' i meant the diagonal should be 22'.
I guess this is part of a OSHA approved trench too!!
read the rest of that thread. no one is entering that trench. i also didn't post a picture of someone standing in it.
Ok, so you dig a trench, no one is going to enter it? What are you going to do with it then? It doesn't matter if you're digging a trench, a cellar hole, a septic system, at no point should your spoils "trickle" back into a hole. You spout off about OSHA rules but apparently you know nothing about them: SPOIL. 1. TEMPORARY SPOIL. Temporary spoil must be placed no closer than 2 ft (0.61 m) from the surface edge of the excavation, measured from the nearest base of the spoil to the cut. This distance should not be measured from the crown of the spoil deposit. This distance requirement ensures that loose rock or soil from the temporary spoil will not fall on employees in the trench. And who cares about a guy in the trench, we can see that he's there to shoot grade, as long as he's far enough back from the machine to be legal then pack them in shoulder to shoulder.
and if there are no employees in the trench it doesn't matter. it says right in the osha paragraph you just posted that it is for employee protection. well, you can't protect an employee from an excavation any more than not allowing them in the excavation at all. in that thread i am discussing a type on trenching installation that is not typically to what most people have seen or work with normally. we install the pipe across the countryside by placing the pipe together on the surface and lowering it into the trench without ever putting a man in the hole.
1 That osha paragraph also says no spoils within 2 feet of the edge of the excavation. 2 Im happy that slapping rural water main together on top of the bank works for you. That is one of the few applications where putting no one in the trench works. If I remember Redots pictures, its common to slipform concrete pipe in the trench in his area. Even if its not slipform, I dont know of many jobs where you can spud large concrete storm and sewer pipe together on top of the ditch. Bottom line, engineer designed trench, that meets osha trenching specs is pictured here. Weather or not someone is in the trench. Its kind of hard to check grade for a gravity feed piping system without someone in the hole. Now back to your rural water work. Since no one is in the hole, i assume your cut is vertical. This leads me to a question. If you are deeper than 6 feet, what do you use for fall protection along the top of that trench? Maybe im just assuming you are working next to a vertical trench line. This would be no different than working on scaffold, and you need to have fall protection so none of your employees working along that trench fall in.
point well taken i have no fall protection in place. i will keep this in mind when i am taking pictures and posting them for the world to see. my original point was that how ever nice looking the trench is there is a man in the hole in the picture. i do not make it a policy to take pictures of illegal activities and post them for the world to see. as far as an engineer designing the trench, the engineers i work for design jobs for functionality not for safety. they always have a statement in the specs that they are not responsible for safety. so if i understand osha law correctly it is most likely that two engineer would need to be involved here. one would be the engineer who designed the project for function and the second would be an engineer who designed and stamped the excavation plan for safety. anyway, my point was that i would not make it a practice to post pictures of illegal activities. i am sure that no matter what job site and type of work we discussed we could nit pick until we found multiple osha violations. again the point is not to advertise them with pictures. do your work safely and without publicity and osha should be no concern.
to beat a dead horse: that picture would be awesome if there weren't a man standing in the bottom of it.
give it a break please, having seen this please give it a break.. the guy says don't critique the trench too much and look at all this b.s
I think we still should mention your digging a trench for a reason. Your going to put something on the bottom of it and outside your circumstance and ditchwitching that means a man in the bottom. If its sloped right and outside of the reach its a safe position.
Rshackleford:..this is for you.. i am a 32 yr veteran of the operating engineers, having spent just about all that time in a excavator seat..i was trained by two people..my father, who ran one for 30+ years and my father-in-law who also ran one for 30+ years..i do NOTHING illegal or have one of my grade checkers or pipelayers get in anything remotely unsafe or illegal. we have a certified engineer inspect the soils on the job before hand from core samplings we take. He then signs off on what we can dig. The job actually calls for a 3/4:1 ditch top to toe if its 12" and under. the ditch pictured is 11' and because i did not like the way the silty sand looked toward the bottom..which was in his report of anticipated soils we could expect..i decided a 1:1 slope would be more appropriate..actually i went a foot over on each side. i'm not scared of publishing pics of my ditches with men in them..thats what they are for..but i do enjoy reading all the debates
Man, around here, that stuff would be sold as topsoil.
reddot, my best trench has never looked that good. you should be proud.
Where at in Fresno, x streets?
its off..the 180, exit marks st..turn left, down a few blocks..its gonna be a veterans retirement home
Over here you never be able to dig a trench like that to much rock,..the rule is a meter down the spoil is a meter back so a 3m (10')deep trench the closest the spoil can be to the edge is 3m(10').
i was working on a job in our home town in which we were installing water main and using the Speedy Shore aluminum shoring system. we had soils which allowed us to space the shoring 6' apart. there was a former employee (had worked for us fifteen years ago) who took issue with what we were doing and reported us to osha three times. twice the osha man drove two hundred miles to see that we were operating in a safe manner. we attended one of our trench safety courses and it happened to be taught by a state official who worked for the state equivalent of osha. his jurisdiction was only over state or municipal employees not over the private sector. several times during the class he told us that he saw either in person or pictures of unsafe work acts and felt that he was required to report these to osha. so what i am getting at is that while you and i are on the same team and if we never have to a single communication osha we are satisfied; however, there are others out there that feel compelled to report anything they feel is unsafe. safe ditch or not this picture could be grounds to start an investigation into your company which could end in a handshake or a fine...i would rather not find out which. with that said i respect the great detail in which you went about the construction of this ditch and the fact that you provided additional sloping over and above what your engineer specified.