First, it’s one of the poorest written articles I’ve read in a while.
Second, I don’t believe a guy falls forty feet and they let him go back to work.
The “let him go back to work” issue is an amateur way of trying to avoid a lost time accident.
First of all, while he may have violated some policy, there is no 40’ “hole” that doesn’t require a barricade preventing such a mishap. Good safety practices don’t appear to have been followed. Construction “not stopping” is a dumb thing — this is a perfect incident for a job-wide safety stand-down and it always looks dumb when you try to sweep such an accident under the rug.
A forty foot fall, even if down an embankment instead of vertical, is a near miss for a fatality. The on-site safety office should have reamed the superintendent a new one, but it looks like he has no management support.
It was probably a 40’ deep hole that sloped. If you hit the slope right, you just slide down.
When I was a child, I fell down a cliff, but I hit a sloped edge that cushioned me and I didn’t get injured.