Trench Collapse Kills Worker : Accident: A second man suffers broken hip when trapped in a roadside drainage ditch. The cause is under investigation.

A 51-year-old construction worker was killed and another man was injured Tuesday when a trench wall collapsed and trapped the men in a roadside drainage ditch.

Co-workers jumped into the ditch to try to free Pedro Ornelas Lopez, who was buried up to his neck under several thousand pounds of dirt, fire officials said.

Firefighters eventually rescued Lopez, who was unconscious and later died at Irvine Medical Center.

A second worker, Alberto Lomeli, 58, of Hawthorne, was buried up to his knees but managed to free himself after the trench caved in, said Capt. Dan Young of the Orange County Fire Authority. Lomeli was treated at the hospital for a broken hip.

Investigators with Cal/OSHA and Brutoco Engineering and Construction Inc., a Fontana-based contractor, spent the afternoon trying to determine the cause of the accident.

The construction was part of a city project to build a quarter-mile-long road underpass that was about two months from completion, said Barry McClellan, Irvine’s public works director. As part of the project, work crews were digging trenches for drainage, McClellan said.

“In my experience, there has never been anything like this happening,” McClellan said. “We’ll be taking a close look at it.”

Brutoco employees at the construction site declined to comment Tuesday, and officials at the company’s headquarters did not return repeated calls.

The accident occurred just before 11 a.m. when Lopez, of Torrance, and Lomeli were digging inside a trench along Culver Drive near Deerfield Avenue.

Without warning, mounds of dirt tumbled into the trench, which fire officials estimated was four feet wide, six feet deep and 30 feet in length.

Cal/OSHA requires that any time workers are in a trench that is more than four feet deep, they must be protected by one of three safety precautions: a metal trench shield, steps dug out along the sides or measures taken to shore up the ditch, fire and city officials said.

McClellan said the trench was only supposed to be four feet deep according to plans submitted to the city, and at that depth precautionary measures were not needed.

But fire department officials estimated the trench was at least six feet deep when the wall collapsed, and said they believed the trench was unstable because of water in the soil.

Young said it did not appear that safety precautions were taken, although the investigation is continuing.

After the cave-in, two nearby workers quickly grabbed shovels and sought to remove the dirt around Lopez. They managed to free Lopez to the waist, while a third worker attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Young said.

“Just because his head was above dirt doesn’t mean his chest can move,” Young said. “If anything, the pressure from the dirt was forcing the air out of him.”

Such accidents are not unusual, he said, but they usually don’t have such tragic results.

“We get at least one of these a month in Orange County and there’s really no reason for them,” Young said