A Glenburn general contractor faces more than $160,000 in federal penalties for the death of his brother at one of his worksites last summer.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration said in a news release Thursday that Patriot Paving Group LLC ignored an onsite expert’s warnings and the company’s site-specific safety plan, which led to the fatal incident in June.

Clifford Lane, the owner of Freedom Paving Group, which does business as Patriot Paving Group, said he will challenge the OSHA penalty. Under federal rules, he has 15 business days to pay the penalty or contest the findings.

“It’s bogus,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “I’m going to contest it because it’s not true.”

Lane said his older brother, Stephen Lane, 67, was the worker who died as a result of the accident.

Two workers were installing storm drainage pipes in a trench between 3 feet and 4 feet deep, OSHA said. When Clifford Lane used an excavator near the retaining wall’s base, it destabilized and caused a 40-to-60-foot-long section of the wall to tip over. One worker escaped but Stephen Lane died from his injuries.   

“The warnings were clear, yet Clifford Lane chose to ignore them, putting progress before safety and putting employees directly in harm’s way,” said OSHA Area Director Samuel Kondrup. “There is no excuse for so callously endangering workers’ lives.”

Lane, 59, said the wall was not built to engineering specifications and lacked a footing beneath it.

“It was built improperly. It had nothing to do with us,” he said, pointing to investigations by the insurance company that said the incident “was 100% not our fault.”

OSHA’s investigators, however, determined that Lane knew the wall was unstable, but did not use necessary protective systems or evacuate employees. The continuing excavation created “clear and imminent dangers,” the agency said.

OSHA cited the company for “willful violations” and proposed penalties of $161,325 for failing to brace the retaining wall, exposing employees to hazards, not removing employees from the trench after it was determined to be hazardous and not training or instructing three employees in the hazards associated with trench activities.