Three years and three months ago, Rosa Isela Batalla Morales learned that her son had been buried alive.
“My husband got a call,” she recalls. “I don’t know exactly what they said to him, but they told him that there had been an accident, a collapse, and my son was the one who had been buried completely … had disappeared into the earth.”
On October 23, 2021, 24-year-old Juan José Galvan Batalla and another worker employed by D Guerra Construction, LLC, were installing a residential wastewater line for a new subdivision in far South Austin. The 13-foot-deep trench they were working in partially collapsed, and they immediately notified their supervisor. No one was hurt. Hours later, according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), they were told to return to work in the unprotected trench, and it collapsed again, burying Batalla and his colleague in soil and debris.
