SAFETY
out around both sides of the broken pipe, and the trench caved in
on me. I screamed.”
His co-worker heard Giguere cry out and hurried back to see a
pile of dirt where the trench had been moments earlier.
He and the other three men on the work crew had a difficult
choice to make, and they had to make it quickly: Use shovels to
dig down to Giguere and perhaps not reach him in time; or, use
the machine to dig, which could kill him as well. No one was sure
how deep he was buried or where exactly he had been at the time
of the collapse.
In the end, they used the machine to remove about two feet of
dirt and dug by hand from there. It took 10 minutes to reach the
buried man. A sheriff arrived in response to their 911 call and began
taking pictures to document the rescue effort.
“I wasn’t conscious for the 10 minutes; I was maybe conscious
for a minute or a minute and a half,” recalled Giguere. “Every time
I exhaled the weight of the dirt pressed on my chest. I couldn’t
breathe; I was suffocating and gasping for air.”
When they pulled him out, Giguere had no pulse and was blue
in the face. The co-worker who had been in the trench with him
began CPR and continued for about 10 minutes until medical
personnel arrived.
“I was dead.”
The aftermath
Giguere’s family, including his new wife, his mother and his grandfather
rushed to the hospital.
“When I was working, I never thought about my 70-year-old
grandfather standing beside my hospital bed, pleading for me not
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Eric Giguere, Safety Awareness Solutions
“Those things you do to your family
and your co-workers when you’re
careless, those things last way longer
than the broken bones. The impact
on your loved ones is tremendous.”
– Eric Giguere
Continued on page 100
98 | ISSUE 1 2020 www.piledrivers.org
/www.wbequipment.com
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