Popular Woodworking: "The costs of any hazard are central to the question of whether or not the Consumer Products Safety Commission should step in and make and enforce rules. It tends to be a touchy area; one persons avocation may affect the amount every one pays for health care and insurance. You might think that we would know, for sure how much money is spent in any given year to pay for table saw injuries. We don’t. We don’t even know how many saws are in use in home workshops or in industry. There are some good estimates about the number and severity of accidents involving table saws, but in the end those are educated guesses.Monday, February 14, 2011
Table Saw Injuries-What is the Real Cost?
Popular Woodworking: "The costs of any hazard are central to the question of whether or not the Consumer Products Safety Commission should step in and make and enforce rules. It tends to be a touchy area; one persons avocation may affect the amount every one pays for health care and insurance. You might think that we would know, for sure how much money is spent in any given year to pay for table saw injuries. We don’t. We don’t even know how many saws are in use in home workshops or in industry. There are some good estimates about the number and severity of accidents involving table saws, but in the end those are educated guesses.
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6 comments:
I agree with the core basis of this article about double checking the estimated numbers of any organization especially if you have extra information to share (like a series of medical bills, workman's comp costs, or loss of work.)In my experience the Journalist who is writing about the subject doesn't quite grasp the entire picture about the topic they are writing about, so estimations may be quite flawed.
In this case, even erring on the side of the Sawstop numbers, it's interesting to note that they came up with $350 million dollars which is nowhere near the $2 Billion that the USAtoday article is quoting.
There is no tool I respect (and fear) more than the table saw. If you let it, it will eat you alive. That said, a healthy respect/fear of it has kept me accident-free at the table saw for almost fifteen years (since I began using the tool). Sure they're dangerous, but I would be very interested to see case-by-case studies of these 35 000 accidents each year. My guess is that a good deal of them are human error and/or user-negligence. "I was tired after a ten-hour day but wanted to finish this one last cut." "I had removed the guard, the riving knife, the kickback keepers and the fence." "I got distracted by something shiny." In other words, why are you only blaming the tool? Maybe the answer isn't to build a "safer" table saw (and require all of us to pay for it) but keep the unsafe table USERS away from the damn thing.
Stopsaws are an insurance policy. If an accident happens you are covered. So the idea that people should be required to pay for a Stopsaw is as ridiculous as the health care debate. It doesn’t matter what it costs on a whole. That imaginary figure doesn't affect the person using the saw. If you don't think you need one don't get it. Just don't complain if an accident happens and you have to pay, with money or your fingers. Now I would buy the Sawstop if it were me because I like to be safe and I know even if you have done something a million times there can still be that one that goes wrong. But as this article shows the figures are not really relevant, are to some extent mere guesses. I think the Sawstop is a genius idea and a good thing to have, that doesn't mean I should have to get one.
If companies just insured that they trained people to safely use their tools and ensured that they were being taken seriously, that alone would decrease the number of injuries. I'd be willing to bet that a vast majority of tablesaw injuries come from people using it incorrectly. Why not make a list of who has been injured and WHY, then train people to do the opposite of what got them hurt? A sawstop can't beat taking personal safety precautions.
Like Kevin said, i as well really appreciated the core basis of this article. With all the #'s that have been tossed around across different respectable information sources, it's been really hard to grasp how big the real problem is. Saw stop and the PTI both have a lot at stake in this debacle but I think a lot of people are wanting to know more if this is really a problem that shouldn't just be solved at the owner/operator level.
It is interesting that the data is not actually gleaned from real in depth research, but rather synthesized from a number of sources to form a statistic which supports the point of whomever it using it. It is not unreasonable however to want people to use the tools they use carefully. the table saw especially is an especially dangerous tool. if fear tactics are what is necessary to educate people about the dangers of table saw use, then maybe that is not such a bad thing. people need to learn to use their tools safely.
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