The Hole Pushed Back

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Twenty years underground. Four years on the drill. A man who had cleared a thousand holes reached for the air line one more time — and the hole pushed back hard enough to kill him. This one isn’t about a rookie making a rookie mistake. It’s about a job nobody was ever trained to do safely, done the way it had always been done.

Brendan P. DeMasters was 40 years old, a contract drilling foreman with 20 years in mining, working the Empire State Mines lead-zinc operation in St. Lawrence County, New York. On the morning of October 2, 2018, his crew found that four holes from the previous shift’s 19-hole blast hadn’t broken through to the drift below. They decided to reload two of them.

To reload a blast hole, you first have to clean it out — blow the leftover sand “stemming” out with compressed air. The crew was using a 7/8-inch plastic grout hose fed off the mine’s air system, running about 115 psi at the nozzle. Because the mine’s 12-inch air line necks down again and again until it reaches that skinny hose, the air screams out the end at roughly 94 miles per hour.

They blasted the two reloaded holes at 11:10 a.m. Thirty minutes later, after the smoke cleared, they went back to check whether the holes had finally broken through. The superintendent ran the air line down hole No. 11 and hit an obstruction about 30 feet down — a wet hole, where the sand stemming had bonded into a plug. He couldn’t push past it. DeMasters took the hose from him, told the man on the valve to “give it full air,” and knelt down with his torso directly over the hole to force the line through the blockage.

About 15 seconds later: a loud pop. The plug gave way all at once. Thirty feet of compressed air that had been building behind that obstruction let go like a cannon, firing a column of sand stemming straight up out of the hole and into his chest. He was pronounced dead at Gouverneur Hospital at 12:33 p.m.

Name it and cite it: 30 CFR 57.13020 — “Use of compressed air.” The standard is one blunt sentence: at no time shall compressed air be directed toward a person, and all necessary precautions shall be taken to protect persons from injury. MSHA cited both the mine operator and the drilling contractor under it. There was a second finding that matters just as much: under 30 CFR 48.7, the contractor couldn’t produce any record that DeMasters — or the two men working beside him — had ever received task training on cleaning blocked vertical blast holes with high-pressure air. Annual refresher? Done. Site hazard training? Done. Training on this specific, deadly task? There wasn’t any.

Translate it to the floor: A blocked hole is a loaded spring. You don’t know how much pressure is stacking up behind that plug, and when it releases it releases everything at once, straight back up the barrel. The body never goes over the opening. You stand off to the side, out of the line of fire, every single time — the same way you’d never put your face over a pressurized line you’re about to crack. DeMasters did it the way the job had always been done, because nobody had ever been taught a safe way to do it. That’s not a careless man. That’s a missing procedure.

The HOP read: Here’s the part that should stop you. The man who died had two decades of experience and took the hose himself. Blame is useless here — you cannot discipline your way out of a hazard nobody named. The person closest to the work saw the blockage first, and the system handed him no safe method for it. MSHA’s own root cause wasn’t “the victim leaned over the hole.” It was that management never built a procedure for clearing an obstruction or told anyone where to stand while doing it. The fix the company put in afterward was exactly that: a written plan for blocked-hole cleaning, with crew positioning spelled out, and training on it. The lesson should never have cost a life to learn.

The Full EHS Picture. This one is overwhelmingly the S — a mechanical energy release, blunt-force chest trauma, one worker dead. On the E side, the event itself was contained to the borehole: MSHA’s report records no spill, release, or offsite environmental impact from the accident. But the setting is worth naming. This is an underground lead-zinc mine, and lead-zinc operations carry their own standing EHS load — heavy-metal-bearing dust, silica, and tailings that NIOSH and MSHA track as long-term H hazards for the people who work them, through respiratory protection and metal-exposure monitoring, long after any single shift ends. The honest line: most incidents are E, H, and S braided together — here the acute failure was purely safety, but the industry it happened in lives with the environmental and health side every day.

OSHA’s FY2026 Top 10 is out — and the list barely moved. Released at the National Safety Council Congress in September, fall protection (1926.501) topped the most-cited list for the 16th straight year with 4,041 citations — more than double the runner-up. Hazard communication was No. 2. And sitting at No. 3: Control of hazardous energy, lockout/tagout (1910.147) with 1,863 citations. So what for safety leaders: the top of this list is the same every year because the hazards are the same every year. If your inspection prep isn’t built around falls, HazCom, and LOTO, you’re prepping for the wrong audit. These aren’t exotic — they’re the fundamentals we keep letting slide.

$446K for skipping the lockout. On September 23, OSHA cited a New Jersey express car-wash chain (ModWash) for willfully exposing workers to hazardous energy — failing to lock out equipment before maintenance — plus repeat LOTO violations and five serious noise violations, totaling $446,864 in proposed penalties. So what: “willful” is the word that turns a citation into a six-figure one. It means the employer knew and did it anyway. Lockout isn’t paperwork for the binder — it’s the difference between a machine that’s off and a machine that’s merely not running yet. Same standard that’s No. 3 on the Top 10 above. The pattern writes itself.

A maintenance tech on a bottling line goes to clear a jam and reaches for the shop air to blow debris out of a guarded pinch point — line still energized, guard swung open, air gun in one hand, other hand near the rollers. His partner stops him before he pulls the trigger: “Where’s your hand gonna go if that air kicks the part loose?” They both stood there a second and realized the answer. No one got hurt. They locked it out, cleared the jam cold, and wrote it up.

No names, no blame — because the tech wasn’t reckless, he was fast, and fast is what the job rewards until the day it doesn’t. The save here was a second set of eyes and a question instead of a correction. That’s the culture working.

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Pick one routine task on your floor that everybody “just knows how to do” — clearing a jam, blowing out a hole or a fitting, breaking a line — and ask whether there’s an actual written procedure for it, with where people stand. If there isn’t, that’s your next JHA. The jobs that kill experienced people are almost always the ones too familiar to have ever been written down.

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Please stay Safe & Hydrated!!!

— Rob