State officials have fined the Dave Shaw Concrete & Block company $128,945 for alleged safety violations after a worker was buried and killed at a large building under construction near South Park in Hermosa.
Shaw said he is appealing the fine, which he expects to be lowered substantially. He called the death of the worker a “terrible accident” and said the conclusions of state investigators were inaccurate in some areas, and painted a misleading picture in others.
The March 10 accident at a construction site on the corner of Cypress Avenue and Sixth Street occurred when the worker, 29-year-old Alejandro Valladares of Hawthorne, plunged head-first into a hole in the ground, coming to rest with only one of his feet exposed as loose soil collapsed around him.
Coworkers tried unsuccessfully to free him, and he quickly perished. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office said Valladares died of suffocation.
The building under construction belongs to the 34-year-old Shaw Concrete, which is based in Palos Verdes Estates.
Investigators with the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that the company endangered Valladares by unsafely placing him on a wooden platform atop the loading forks of a tractor, where he was unsafely directed to use a soil-tamping machine as a pile driver, and then fell into a hole that was not properly covered or otherwise protected.
Shaw said the hole was covered except while the work was being done, and even then the hole was nearly filled by the I-beam inside it.
“The I-beam was darn near as big as the hole,” Shaw said. “But everything went wrong at that moment. You have to uncover the hole to pour concrete.”
Shaw said Valladares was not driving a pile into the ground, but was using the soil-tamping rammer to adjust the position of the pile. But Shaw added that the use of the equipment “probably wasn’t a good idea.”
Shaw acknowledged that Valladares was standing on a platform placed on the forks of a tractor, and said that “probably was not a good idea either.”
“Unfortunately I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t have let anyone do that anyway. What your guys do, you can’t control everything. You talk about these things, you emphasize safety 24-seven in this business,” he said.
“There wasn’t anybody on that job who would have ever imagined anything like that could happen like it happened,” Shaw said. “We weren’t doing anything daredevil. It was just a sequence of events that went terribly wrong. We’ll second guess ourselves the rest of our lives, but we can’t do anything about what happened, unfortunately.”
Cal-OSHA spokeswoman Krisann Chasarik said safety-related fines in an accident can range “from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars.”
“There is a wide range,” she said. “This is obviously on the higher end, and we don’t commonly see citations this large.”
The agency issued six citations against Shaw Concrete. The bulk of the fines, $106,000 worth, were for alleged violations related to the accident.
Cal-OSHA levied a $70,000 fine for what it called a willful failure to provide “fall protection” by placing Valladares on a piece of wood placed across the forks of a Caterpillar Bobcat tractor to work with the beam.
A warning label “in plain view” on the tractor reads “Avoid injury or death, never carry riders, never use loader as a man lift or work platform,” according to OSHA’s written notice to Shaw Concrete.
“The warning label includes a drawing depicting an employee falling headfirst from the Bobcat loader and striking a surface with his head,” according to Cal-OSHA.
Investigators said Valladares’ wood platform was seven feet off the ground when he plunged into the two-foot wide, 16-foot deep hole in the soil.
Cal-OSHA fined the company $18,000 for directing Valladares to use the tamping rammer as a pile driver, when the device is “intended to be used for compacting soil.”
A manual for the rammer states in part, “Do not use this machine on ground that is harder than the machine can handle, or for driving piles,” the investigators found.
Cal-OSHA fined the company $18,000 for failing to barricade or cover the “open and unguarded” hole into which Vallandares fell, along with eight other holes in the ground.
“They said nine holes were uncovered – that’s just not true,” Shaw said.
He said all the holes had been covered, but the appearance of the worksite was greatly changed when Los Angeles County Urban Search and Rescue workers, along with firefighters from the beach cities and Torrance, toiled to free Valladares’ body from the soil.
“It looked like a bomb had gone off by the time OSHA got there. There was massive digging going on, everyone doing what they could to save Alejandro…They took the whole site and basically sucked all the sand out of it,” he said.
‘Very professional’
General contractor Kim Komick, who has worked extensively with Shaw on other projects, called him “one of the most professional subcontractors we have in the city.”
She said small builders in the beach cities do their best to follow Cal-OSHA’s rules.
“I’ve worked with Dave for 26 years and he’s always done a good job as far as construction, thoroughness, preparation and safety,” said Dan Bronner, president of D65 Enterprises in Manhattan Beach. “On a human note he treats all his employees like family members. I know this accident will leave him emotionally scarred for a long time. I can’t imagine the effect this will have on him. His heart’s as big as he is, and he’s a big guy.”
Architect Dean Nota, who has designed houses for which Shaw has laid the foundations, also praised the concrete subcontractor.
“It’s obvious from his longevity that he’s a bona fide businessman…Construction is rife with people who are cutting corners to stay in business, and Dave is not like that. He is very professional,” Nota said.
“When you say ‘one of the good guys,’ that’s what I would say. He’s a straight shooter, he never cuts corners,” Nota said.
“Construction is a dangerous business. No matter how hard you try, there will always be problems with life safety,” he said.
In the aftermath of Valladares’ death, Shaw said the accident was the only one of that magnitude in the company’s history.
“The only other ones were a couple of back injuries and some stitches,” he said. “I’ve been working in Hermosa and Manhattan since 1976. We’ve done the majority of concrete work there for 34 years.”
Shaw, who maintains company offices at Malaga Cove, said his two-story Hermosa field office, with underground parking, will contain additional company offices and other offices for lease.
Shaw described Valladares as “a great guy” who had worked for the company for about nine years, and lived in Hawthorne with a sister, a brother, two nieces and a nephew.
“We’re a big family. We have about 35 employees, two of them from the start in 1976, and others on through all the years. We all know each other and we work together. Definitely this is a family business. Everybody is devastated by this,” Shaw said.
Prior to Valladares’ death, the last construction fatality in Hermosa occurred about six years before, when a worker fell from scaffolding at a partially-built home on the walk street portion of Eighth Street near The Strand. ER
