Survivor Thomas Richer heard “Get out of here, the wall is falling!” when the retaining wall started to collapse, he told B.C. Supreme Court
A pipelayer who survived the collapse of a retaining wall on a Burnaby city sewer project, killing his co-worker, said “all hell broke loose” when the wall caved, sending him running for his life.
Thomas Richer recounted the moments of the accident, which led to his foreman, David Green, being tried for manslaughter in a B.C. Supreme Court trial that began this week. Their former employer, J. Cote and Son Excavating, is being tried in the same case for two counts of criminal negligence, one for causing death, the other for causing bodily harm.
Richer said he heard “Get out of here, the wall is falling!,” when the retaining wall that was part of a residential property next to the trench started to collapse, he told the second day of the trial.
Instead of laying charges under B.C.’s occupational health and safety regulations, Burnaby RCMP recommended charges under a 2004 federal law that makes companies and their bosses responsible for death or injury to workers because of safety failures and has only been used three times in B.C.
On Tuesday under prosecution questioning, Richer testified he told Green and others several times he thought the three-metre wide and four-metre deep trench was not structurally safe.
He said he had repeated his concerns to Green just 10 minutes before the collapse, during the morning coffee break on Oct. 11, 2012.
Jeff Caron, 28, a fellow pipelayer, was killed when he was pinned by the falling retaining wall against a piece of machinery called a Jumping Jack that’s used to compact earth around pipes.
When asked by assistant prosecutor Emmanuelle Rouleau who Richer thought was responsible for stopping work because of unsafe conditions, Richer replied, “Mr. Green was.”
The day before the collapse, Richer told Green he wouldn’t work in the trench because of lack of structural supports and the soft, sandy texture of the soil, which he felt made the walls vulnerable to collapse.
“It was an open excavation and it was too deep for me,” Richer told court. “It’s too dangerous. It didn’t look very structural to me.”
But he said he did work in the trench the next day, the day it collapsed, because Green showed him an engineering report that said the trench was safe.
Green told him he was hired as a pipelayer and needed to work in the trench, he said.
Richer was “in fear of losing my job” if he didn’t work in the trench, he said.
After the morning break, he and Caron returned to the trench, and Caron was cutting concrete with a loud saw. Richer said he purposely left his ear protection plugs out “because I wanted to be able to hear if somebody yelled at us” at a sign of danger.
When he heard someone yell to get out because the wall was falling, Richer said, “That’s when all hell broke loose. Something hit me, I bounced off of something,” and fell.
He said he saw Caron pushed up against the Jumping Jack.
Richer ran out of the trench and he could see Green running down the laneway and he called out after him, “Where the (bleep) are you going, Dave? Mr. Green said he didn’t know.”
“He ran away from us. He thought me and Jeff were both dead, I guess,” he said. “I told him to call 911 and asked Mark to lift the wall off Jeff.”
Mark, whom he called the operator and wasn’t identified by his last name in court, lifted the wall off with a backhoe but Caron fell back into the trench, Richer told court.
He went back into the trench because “I just wanted the kid to be alive” but he said there was no pulse.
Richer said he broke three ribs, and had injuries to his back and neck, “and my mind,” and was taken to hospital and released later that day.
The trial is scheduled for 29 days.