Ground Collapses, Burying Well Driller : Cave-In: Unstable soil hampers rescue, but officials say they are acting on premise that workman is alive. Safety agencies are investigating.

A 50-year-old San Bernardino man was trapped under tons of sand and mud when the ground gave way under him at a drilling site in Bell, Los Angeles County Fire Department officials said Tuesday.

Officials held out some hope that Ken Stott might be alive hours after he was buried by soil in an accident at a Southern California Water Co. plant site. Stott was working for a contractor drilling a well.

“We’re treating it as if he is still alive,” said Fire Capt. Bob Grafton as more than 35 rescue crew members attempted to dig out Stott, with hope dimming as each hour passed. “However, progress is slow,” Grafton added, noting that rescuers had to work slowly for safety reasons. “The soil here is very unstable.”

To reach Stott, workers lowered a large drainpipe 36 feet into the hole immediately above “where we think he is,” Grafton said. Late Tuesday evening--about 12 hours after the cave-in--a firefighter was lowered into the six-foot-diameter pipe to continue excavation efforts, using the steel sides of the pipe as further protection against cave-ins.

As the night wore on, efforts to remove the soil quickly with vacuum equipment failed because of the density of the clay-like soil. Firefighters began taking turns inside the pipe digging with shovels. The rescue efforts were expected to continue through the night. One firefighter said, “We’ll be here until he’s found.”

Investigators from the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office were at the scene and said the accident was under investigation for possible safety violations.

According to officials and a witness, Stott, an 11-year driller for McCalla Bros. Pump & Drilling Co. of Chino, was at the site about 8:30 a.m. A new 500-foot well had been drilled on the narrow sandy lot on Bissell Street, behind a water tower and a reservoir.

Stott, who was a supervisor at the site, apparently dug another 10- to 12-foot hole with a backhoe near the well’s pipe shaft. But when he went into the opening, the soil underneath and around him dropped away and he sank from view, witnesses said.

“I tried to get him out,” co-worker Eric Gottleib said as fire officials brought in a 100-ton crane to move heavy equipment near the hole.

Gottleib and a few other McCalla workers spent most of the day sitting quietly near the hole where Stott, who had worked on oil and water drilling operations all of his life, had disappeared.

“There was just too much dirt on top of him,” Gottleib said. “I got the backhoe and scooped out some dirt, and I still couldn’t see him. Then I went and started scooping with my hands. I still couldn’t see him. Then I got out and the whole thing collapsed.”

Fire official Brian Johnson said rescuers were unsure how far down Stott was.

Larry Bonadurer, a McCalla safety officer, said Stott and Gottleib were going to remove a sealing material that had been placed around the well and replace it with concrete.

“He was trying to remove some debris around the casing,” Bonadurer said. But digging the hole and then going into the hole was “totally against policy,” he added. Bonadurer said company employees are supposed to work only from the ground level, and have equipment to accomplish their tasks from there.

Bonadurer described Stott as “a very level-headed fellow, our No. 1 driller, the most experienced” McCalla employee at his job. He said he did not know why Stott “made the decision himself” to do an excavation. “Haste to accomplish the job is the only thing I can imagine,” Bonadurer said.

Pete Martinez, an investigator with the district attorney’s office, said company personnel involved with the project would be interviewed. He was concerned, he said, that “apparently there was no shoring” at the hole where the well was being drilled. Shoring involves placing wood and steel around openings to prevent collapse. “Any time you go over five feet you have to have shoring,” Martinez said.

Cal/OSHA investigator Warren Etchells said he was also disturbed by the lack of shoring: “We want to find out if there was negligence, if this was a standard operation or an act of God.”

During the day, fire officials drew on the expertise of Metro Rail technicians and others familiar with unstable soil to plan their rescue attempt.

Stott’s wife, Brenda; daughter, Mary, and son, Robert, kept vigil in a trailer on the site.

“He’ll come out of this. We pray a lot,” Brenda Stott said.

Accident Site, a welder working on a well at a site in Bell was trapped Tuesday morning when several tons of dirt collapsed on him.