Some Notes on Trench Safety
Three days of soaking the soil with water worked wonders, and today I got the future greenhouse moisture pit down to final depth. I still need to widen it to accept the concrete liners.
Doesn't look like much, but it's about thirty inches deep and two feet on a side at the bottom. Here's the discard pile, soon to be used in another earthworks project along the side of the house (Operation Dry Pathway).
Just to be clear: I have not stood in the pit. I'm not really planning to if it's possible to avoid standing in it. There are some very simple rules of thumb for safely working in pits in your own garden:
- Never get into a hole deeper than your waist without another person nearby and a ladder
- Never get into a hole deeper than three feet without having engineered shoring hold up the sides
- Never put your head below the surface of the soil
This stuff isn't, like, super-safe, over-cautious behaviour. It's a bare minimum to keep you from being killed by collapsing dirt, which can happen a lot faster and stronger than you can imagine. I generally don't get into any pit I can't walk out of comfortably. So I'm planning to widen my little pit from the surface, which makes it a bit slower. But you know, slow and alive is a pretty nice combination. Please be very careful around holes.
Technorati Tags: digging, foundation, shed
posted by ayse on 09/24/06