New Course: Excavation Safety Training

Excavation work is unpredictable by nature. Soil, water, and site conditions shift throughout a project, and the crews who stay safe are the ones trained to catch those changes before they become emergencies. HeatSpring’s new Excavation Safety Training course, taught by CAM Services, covers what it takes to plan, monitor, and respond to excavation hazards from first shovel to backfill.

The course runs three hours, covering pre-excavation planning, hazard recognition, protective systems, and emergency response, with the competent person’s inspection and stop-work authority woven throughout.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain basic excavation terminology, operations, and pre-excavation planning requirements
• Describe the role of the competent person in inspecting excavations and responding to changing conditions
• Identify when excavation work should be stopped, corrected, reinspected, and authorized before work resumes
• Identify factors that should be evaluated before excavation begins, including utilities, soil conditions, access, equipment, and surrounding hazards
• Recognize common excavation hazards, including unstable soil, water, electrical hazards, equipment movement, and hazardous atmospheres
• Explain how soil, water, vibration, nearby loads, and changing site conditions affect excavation safety

Along the way, students get into the details that make those objectives practical on a real job site: 811 locate procedures, American Public Works Association (APWA) marking colors, tolerance zones, and what to do when a locate mark turns out to be incomplete. The course walks through soil failure types and warning signs like tension cracks and boiling, then covers the protective systems used to prevent them, from sloping and benching to soldier pile, sheet piling, and tieback systems.

The course also covers confined space controls, including atmospheric testing, entry permits, and rescue planning, alongside the broader hazard recognition material on unstable soil, water, and equipment risks. Because things can go wrong on site, the course closes with response procedures for utility strikes: gas, electrical, water, sewer, and fiber.

The instructor draws on firsthand field stories throughout, including a few close calls, which ground the standards-based material in what actually happens when conditions change fast.

About CAM Services

CAM Services is a Colorado-based company founded by Cameron Quinonez, a master electrician and NABCEP-certified professional with a background in commercial solar construction. The company runs a Department of Labor registered apprenticeship program for solar PV technicians and construction craft laborers, built as a flexible, mostly self-paced online format for traveling crews, with bilingual content for workers more comfortable learning in Spanish. Since launching, the program has enrolled several hundred apprentices and requires employers to provide a one-to-one on-site mentor for each participant.

Enroll your team in the Excavation Safety Training course today!