When a young man working in a trench at a personal care facility in Penn Township died on the job last fall, it was a tragedy.

Now, a federal investigation has called the death of 21-year-old Jacob Casher a product of willful negligence. More clearly now, it was an outrage.

At about 1:30 p.m. Sept. 28, 2015, the trench at the 296 Dinnerbell Road facility collapsed onto Casher, who had jumped back into the excavation to retrieve some tools while working for the company A Rooter Man, which was installing a sewer line.

The collapse killed Casher, of Clearfield, Pa., crushing and burying him beneath thousands of pounds of earth. He had been working for the company, a Hookstown, Beaver County franchise of the national A Rooter Man chain, all of three weeks.

Federal officials with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration did not pull any punches this week when they released the findings of their investigation into the circumstances of the fatal collapse.

“A Rooter Man of Pittsburgh knowingly took unacceptable risks in an excavation, which led to a tragic and preventable death of a young man with his whole future ahead,” said Christopher Robinson, director of OSHA’s Pittsburgh area office, in a press release Tuesday.

“Common-sense safety practices would have prevented this trench from turning into a worker’s grave.”

Unsafe and illegal working conditions resulting in the death of an employee is bad enough. But OSHA’s report goes a step further, finding that the company routinely exposed multiple employees to cave-in hazards while they worked in trenches more than five feet maximum depth allowed without shoring.

In other words, this company’s job sites were accidents waiting to happen. And these unsafe conditions persisted with the direct knowledge of the owner, Jim English, who OSHA said normally served as the excavator on jobs.

English, who was aware of the “highly unstable” condition of excavated soil according to OSHA, couldn’t even be bothered to move the loose rock and dirt away from the edge of excavation sites as required by regulation.

According to the agency’s report, soil from the excavation at on Dinnerbell Road was “placed along the edge,” of an 11-foot-deep, 10-foot-long “near vertical” trench that was accumulating water and went unprotected by any system to prevent the kind of cave-in that killed Jacob Casher. English couldn’t be bothered to implement the most rudimentary safety procedures: employees working in the trench that day didn’t even have hard hats on, OSHA investigators found.

Ultimately, that irresponsible and inexcusable behavior will cost English’s company dearly, to the tune of $174,000 in fines.

Those fines may prompt A Rooter Man to eliminate the dangerous conditions at its job sites, but they won’t bring Jacob Casher back to life.