Tips for spotting a deadly excavation site before you step in it

I only did utility work for about six summers before moving on, but one job on a waterline replacement still sticks with me. We had maybe an eight foot cut through clay that had been sitting open for almost two weeks. Crew chief kept saying it had held this long, it'll hold till Friday. Then a Saturday storm rolled through and Monday morning there was a fresh crack running along the lip about three feet back from the edge. Same dirt, same walls, completley diferent animal after a soak. We cut the banks back before anyone went down that day.

The other thing I learned the hard way is that the spoil pile thing is real. On one job they piled the backfill right along the rim becasue there was nowhere else to put it, and we started seeing little sloughs peeling off the wall underneath it by mid afternoon. Moved the pile back a ways and it settled down. And yeah on the gut feeling part. I'm not a dramatic person but I walked off a septic tap once because the foreman was rushing us in and out and nobody had set a ladder that reached down far enough. Got told I was being soft. Found out later that same crew had a near miss the following month. No regret at all, I'd do it again tomorrow.

Reading this takes me back. When I started in the mid 70s we didn't have trench boxes on half the jobs, we laid timber sheeting with screw jacks as we went down. Slow as Christmas but nobody got buried. What bugs me about these stories is the foreman angle. I ran crews for the last fifteen years of my working life and the first thing I did every morning was walk the cut myself before a soul stepped in. Cost me ten minutes. Any boss who won't give you ten minutes doesn't deserve a crew.

Gotta push back a bit on the gut feeling stuff. I don't think it's some mystical stomach thing, and telling new guys that makes them wait around for a vibe instead of just looking. What you're actually doing is noticing stuff, the crack, the sloughing, the missing ladder, and your brain flags it before you've put words to it. I've worked with guys who froze up and called it instinct when there was nothing wrong, and other times they walked past a bad wall because the foreman was friendly and nothing 'felt' off. Call it what it is: you saw a warning sign. Train yourself to name the sign out loud and you won't need magic.

Homeowner here so I've never been in one of these holes myself, but last summer a crew dug a long skinny trench across my yard for a new water line and I watched them work all day. The walls were straight up and down and the dirt they scooped out went right along the top edge, exactly like what's being talked about here. They were friendly guys and seemed to know what they were doing otherwise, so I figured that was just how it's done. Is the dirt pile thing somthing the crew is supposed to handle, or is that on the guy running the job?

Update: the pushback on the gut feeling thing stuck with me, so I changed how I talk to the new guys. Now I make them say out loud what they're seeing, the bulge, the spoil pile, whatever, before I say a word. One kid caught a cracked wall face that way last month. Still fighting the same battle with foremen though. For the guy who ran crews, how do you handle a super who overrules you on shoring?