Vancouver construction company Rotschy fined $170K

A Vancouver construction company faces roughly $170,000 in fines after an excavator bucket fell onto a worker at a Woodland jobsite earlier this year.

The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries announced Wednesday it’s fining Rotschy Inc. for the June incident that left a man with traumatic injuries to the lower half of his body.

The company is appealing the fines.

“Making sure our team and customers are safe on the job is the top focus for each of us at Rotschy, from our field teams to our company’s leaders,” said Doug Hiivala, director of occupational health and communications at Rotschy.

Hiivala said the company takes the recent inspection seriously and follows a rigorous compliance process to review and address issues.

Rotschy is working to strengthen its safety practices, including increasing its safety team and daily jobsite monitoring process, he added.

“We are committed to continuous improvement and to maintaining a strong safety culture,” Hiivala said.

The department said the injured employee was working in a trench box and giving hand signals to the excavator operator when the bucket fell, crushing the lower half of his body. A trench box is a metal device used to prevent cave-ins in trenches.

The operator tried to lift the bucket off the worker using the hydraulic arm of the excavator when the bucket slipped, falling onto the worker a second time, according to L&I.

The injured worker was eventually rescued by Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue. According to L&I, he was hospitalized for about a month.

The department said Wednesday that excavators on the jobsite had quick couplers, intended to allow the operator to detach and connect various attachments without leaving the cab. But both excavators were missing a safety latch designed to prevent the bucket from falling off in case of operator error or equipment failure.

“Quick couplers are standard in the industry, but removing the safety latch from them certainly isn’t,” said Craig Blackwood, assistant director for L&I’s division of occupational safety and health.

The site superintendent and site supervisor both told a labor department inspector they knew the safety latches were missing, according to the department’s news release.

The department also said the company found after the incident that 13 of its excavators did not have the required safety latches.

The department ultimately fined Rotschy $170,136 and added it to the department’s Severe Violators list.

The labor department also fined Rotschy another $13,770 last month for confined space violations relating to an upright sewer manhole.

The company has faced scrutiny in recent years after a teen employee lost his legs on the job in 2023.