ALLIANCE, Neb. In the front yard of a ranch-style house at 2812 Toluca Ave. stands an evergreen tree perhaps four feet high. It marks, by chance, the approximate location of Jim Spencers death.

Few have reason to know this. One who does is Spencers wife, Cheryl, who has parked her Dodge Durango across the street on a late summer morning but does not get out. She was here on the afternoon of March 21, 2016, when the house was under construction. Her husband, a plumber, had been on his knees, laying sewer pipe in an 8-foot-deep trench, when a co-worker driving a backhoe inadvertently buried him in dirt. She watched behind the yellow tape as firefighters and emergency medical technicians worked to extract his 220-pound body. When she last saw him, he was lifeless on a backboard, soil sprinkled in his gray beard and smeared on his forehead.

Twenty-six workers died in trench collapses in the United States in 2016 twice as many as the year before, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Jim Spencer, genial and skilled at his trade, suffocated as he was approaching retirement, at 61. His death unmoored his wife of nearly 40 years, forcing her to take on new responsibilities and fill chunks of time he would have occupied. She pines for his after-work banter, his joking references to her as old woman, his ability to fix almost anything that needed fixing. She attends group therapy sessions every few weeks to connect with others who are hurting, and to burn off some of her own anger. My biggest meltdowns I usually have at home, she says. I dont want anybody to see what those are like.

When a worker dies of traumatic injury, gloom spreads like a webbed crack on an ice-covered pond, reaching far beyond the immediate family to touch former colleagues, lifelong friends and in Jim Spencers case waitresses, convenience-store clerks and other strangers he routinely engaged in conversation in this western Nebraska railroad town of 9,000 people. His life and thousands of others were extinguished last year because an employer either didnt know about or disregarded provisions of the 47-year-old federal law that guarantees a safe workplace. The steps needed to prevent trench cave-ins are no secret or shouldnt be. Sections 1926.651 and 1926.652 of regulations adopted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act state, among other things, that heavy equipment must be kept away from trench edges, and that trenches 5 feet or deeper must be shored up except when excavations are made entirely in stable rock.

Such was not the case that early spring day in Alliance as Jim Spencer was laying pipe on Toluca Avenue. The general contractor overseeing the building of the house, Clau-Chin Construction, had outsourced the trench-digging to an excavation contractor, Larry Kessler Construction. Interviewed by officials with the Labor Departments Occupational Safety and Health Administration after Spencers death, the owners of both companies Shaun Houchin, of Clau-Chin, and Kessler professed ignorance of the OSHA trenching standard. Both were cited and assessed fines of $24,800 and $16,800, respectively. To me, that was nothing, Cheryl Spencer says. How is it you can kill somebody with a car and get charged with vehicular homicide, and kill somebody in a trench and get a slap on the wrist?