UNITED STATES
DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

Employee #1 and some coworkers were working for a general building contractor. On the day of the accident, the firm was acting as a subcontractor, excavating to a depth of up to 2.1 meters in a parking yard where water had leaked and formed a pool. DigAlert, the service that marked the ground to indicate where underground utilities were located, had been called by the general contractor at the jobsite the day before, and at the time accident, DigAlert markings were noted on the street fronting the parking yard. Exploratory excavations up to 1.5 meters deep were to be made, because there was no plat indicating the location of the underground utilities. Digging had started the day before, with Employee #1 operating a loader with a front-end attachment. On the morning of the accident, the loader hit a 16-kilovolt underground power line and cut a conductor, causing a power brownout in the neighborhood. According to the crew foreman, Employee #1 felt an electric shock. He was transported to Daniel Freeman Hospital and released less than an hour later, the examining doctor having found no evident injury. He was not hospitalized. A site investigation showed that no attempt had been made to transfer the DigAlert markings from the street to the site where the firm had been digging.