Crews practise rescues from trench Cave-ins
Hands-on exercise provides experience that can’t be learned in a classroom
Down at the bottom of a trench in the middle of a Regina street on Thursday, Shawn Hexham was brought back to something he’d experienced before.
He was working on a construction site when the right side of the trench he was in collapsed. Hexham was pushed back against the wall and then thrown back the other way.
“By the time I opened my eyes,” he said, “there was three guys just digging me out by hand because we were in the middle of nowhere.
“The worst pain I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “My upper body came back and I went over my knee, and the loudest pop I’ve ever heard in my life.”
His time in the trench in Regina though, was a mock cave-in exercise for Emeritus Energy and other organizations to practise rescue operations.
On the corner of Wallace Street and 17th Avenue, workers from multiple organizations participated in the safety training drill, including Regina Fire and Protection Services and the Saskatchewan Construction Safety Association (SCSA).
After Hexham had positioned himself in the trench, workers jumped into action as if the trench had really just collapsed. One worker called 911, another stayed at the top of the trench and talked to Hexham to keep him in the loop, others worked to brace the walls to prevent further cave-ins.
Once the firefighters arrived, they took over the operation, extending the fire truck’s crane over the trench to lower down a spine board and then haul Hexham out. From start to finish, the exercise took 33 minutes.
“When it’s on paper, everything looks good, but until you actually test the system, you’re not going to know how your system’s going to operate in real time,” said James Scott, owner of Emeritus Energy.
He said both he and the fire department had pulled out points in their safety procedures that could use improvement after conducting this trial run.
“I’ve pulled out probably 15 to 16 things that I’m going to look at,” he said.
This training exercise makes him feel safer working in construction trenches, he said, and he hopes other workers feel the same.
Collin Pullar, president of the SCSA, said this type of safety training needs to be more common.
“It’s one thing to learn in a classroom and have all your books ready ... but when push comes to shove, what happens when the incident actually occurs?” he said. “You only really know when you’ve practised it.”
This helps construction companies analyze which parts of their safety procedures work well and which need some work.
“Our goal is to try to create the safest construction environment in Canada, and the only way we’re going to do that is if we are being safe and if we know what to do if something does go wrong,” said Pullar.
Scott hopes more construction companies will start to do this type of live training.
“If this saves one life, we’ve achieved our aim,” he said.