Calls for tighter regulations, job site control mount after Ajax trench collapse kills 2 workers

Two workers died after a trench caved in on them at a job site in Ajax, Ont. on Monday, prompting calls for tighter safety regulations and more regular inspections on construction sites to prevent fatal workplace accidents in the field.

Two others were also injured in Monday's trench collapse, which is now the subject of an ongoing investigation by Ontario's Ministry of Labour. Some say the incident is entirely preventable.

Trish Penny's brother Luke died in a workplace accident on May 19, 2010, when he was working in a trench on a detached garage of a home in Whitby, Ont.

A concrete wall caved in and collapsed on top of him, killing him almost instantly.

Penny said it was her brother's first day working on the project, when he dug a trench along the perimeter of one side of the building. His job was to make sure the area was prepped and cleaned to apply weather proofing membrane.

She said she feels the pain of the families who are now having to grief the loss of their loved one after saying goodbye to them on the morning they headed to work, not knowing it would be their last time.

"It's absolutely devastating and it's preventable," Penny told CBC Toronto.

"Your immediate thought is 'This is horrendous,''How could this happen?' and then you're transported right back to that day and remembering when the police knock on the door and enter your house to tell you that somebody has passed away because they went to work that day."

After being introduced to Threads of Life — a charity dedicated to supporting families after a workplace fatality, life-altering injury or occupational disease — Penny and her family began to share their story to bring awareness to the importance of health and safety at the workplace to help prevent incidents like these from occurring.

On Monday night through to Tuesday morning, firefighters and crews used heavy excavating equipment, working through the night trying to recover the buried men, who worked for Direct Underground Inc. and the construction company Grascan Construction Ltd. Their bodies were retrieved at 2:30 a.m. 

Excavation refers to a hole left in the ground as the result of removing material, while a trench is an excavation in which the depth exceeds the width.

While it is not known exactly what happened at the Ajax site that led to the deaths of the two workers, there are a number of measures to protect against cave-ins, says Enzo Garritano, CEO and president of the Infrastructure Health and Safety Association (IHSA). These measures include sloping, trench boxes and shoring, which are all designed to protect workers from the hazards of cave-ins when trenches are being used.

IHSA offers training to employers in construction, transportation and electrical utilities sectors around safety and compliance standards.

"In this case here, we really don't know what occurred at this point. Was it a collapse and they were outside[of] the trench or were they in the trench?" Garritano said.