One man was killed after he fell 12 feet into a hole and was buried by a foot-and-a-half of dirt by an on-ramp onto southbound Interstate 95.
The man wasn’t working in the hole at the time of the accident. He was standing on an excavator and landed on the end of the trench which caused the ground to give way. The hole the man fell in was originally 15-feet wide.
After he fell into the hole, other workers jumped in to try to rescue to the man to no avail. Fire rescue workers from Hallandale, Hollywood and the BSO arrived, but only the man’s legs were visible in the hole when they got there.
It took fire fighters around 15 minutes to reach the victim after preliminary work was done at the scene.
“Our technical rescue team has to secure that,” BSO Fire Rescue Spokesman Mike Jachles said. “They have to shore it up. They have to make sure they don’t cause a secondary cave-in or collapse and have more victims.”
Once the man was found he was pronounced dead. Jachles said if workers had been working in the hole, a trench box would have been in place.
The victim’s name has not been released. His body was recovered, lifted from the hole, and turned over to the Broward County Medical Examiner.
