Safety Sins
Two posts in quick succesion are an unwelcome surprise considering the subject today. Even more unusual is that I’m writing this on the day in question which prompted this post.
This isn’t turning into a stream of consciousness blog. Yet. Consider this a PSA and an attempt by me to fully process what happened.
Despite some (okay, many) of my mental hangups, there are a few things I am quite confident about when it comes to myself. Two are pertinent to today’s post: I believe I am very safety conscious, and I believe I am very deliberate and considered in actions I take from day to day. So when those assumptions are shattered, I am, as the youth would say, shook. I am shooketh.
Maybe it’s also from almost sustaining a life altering injury (none of my usual hyperbole, very Serious™️), but that would be spoilers.
In my professional career I work with (and potentially design) equipment which can cause significant capital damage and loss of human life. The risk is such that there is an entire field dedicated to the identification and mitigation of potential risks and hazards, a core component of which being HAZOP Study. Failures in engineering are a fascinating and sobering study in cascading failures. Few disasters are the result of one negligent action, or single equipment failure, but rather a chain of decisions, actions, and small failures over time which led to ultimate disaster. An enlightening look at many of these are the accident reports and videos generated by U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
The causal chain I’m describing is sometimes called the Swiss cheese model. Safety and risk management can be seen as layers of Swiss cheese, each layer is imperfect with holes through which errors can pass, the hope is that through enough layers there is no chance the holes can all line up and allow an incident to occur by cascading failure. This is reductive, but it is a good visualisation to consider.
I’m really good at HAZOP analysis. I enjoy it deeply and have the analytical mindset and cross-domain knowledge to very effectively identify risks and formulate mitigation strategies for risks. I’m not afraid to put my foot down and deny risky operations. I’ve done so in the past and I will do so again.
Yet, through complacency (or hubris if I were to be unkind), and inattention I failed to apply that same care today to myself. I committed some safety sins and nearly paid dearly for them.
I wouldn’t say I’m good at DIY, since that would feel like denigrating the skills I have, see hubris above, Let’s say I’m good with my hands. I am familiar with a lot of tools and usually I’m very mindful of the risks involved with each. Especially when they are power tools. For the last few weeks I’ve been renovating my workshop, and the current phase involves installing furring to a wall so I can clad it. The lumber I’m using, after being cut to length, required a total of 54 pockets and 54 through holes to be drilled, each identical for mounting bolts.
The obvious and most effective tool for this is a pedestal drill. Of course, being a tool nerd I have one, it’s pretty neat. Once the first pocket and hole are drilled, depth stops can be set, guides can be fastened, and the process becomes a mostly repetitive affair of 108 drilling operations.
With this routine comes the first safety sin, inattention. By the 15th hole I’m wondering what podcast to listen to rather than really concentrating on the process.
Now, construction lumber is usually rough sawn, so as the name implies it’s rough to handle and prone to giving splinters. It’s also chemically treated, which when fresh is quite aggresive on skin. In this particular case I had the additional annoyance of quite soggy lumber, which left smatterings of surface mould here and there.
In short, its really unpleasant to handle.
Halfway through processing all this wood I took a break and decided to wear some gloves.
One might think putting some protective equipment on is sensible, but in woodworking (and drills of any kind) this is not the case for gloves. For those who know, I would deservedly be excoriated for doing so. Skin gets cut. Gloves get pulled into machinery. Along with the rest of your hand.
To the protect the squeamish and those of poor mental constitution I still have all my body parts, didn’t even suffer bloodloss.
I knew these risks, and deemed them irrelevent in the moment. I was careful, I had a defined workflow already. Some comfort in handling the rest of the wood would be nice. The second safety sin is complacency.
On the second to last drilling operation I dropped the vacuum hose. I turned left to pick it up. As I turned back, the tip of my right hand grazed the edge of the spinning drill. I was looking at the machine as this happened. I like to think my subconscious reacted quicker then, wrenching my hand away as rapidly and strongly as I could, but the sobering reality is that within milisecond the glove and my hand were doing their best to get wrapped around the spindle of the drill and no action from my side could have prevented that.
The glove tore off, ripped to shreds before I could even hit the emergency stop switch or consciously process what was happening.
I stood and stared for several seconds at my hand. Heart thundering with adrenaline and incredulous that I still had all my digits. The drill kept whirring in the background, the remains of the glove flapping around it. As I type this now I have some large bruises, abrasions, and quite intense joint and ligament pain on my right hand. A mercy compared to what could’ve happened.
I don’t think I’ve done anything as reckless or stupid as this since deliberately electrocuting myself at 7 to figure out how bad it would hurt.
Lucky doesn’t even begin to describe this outcome. After thinking about it all day I’ve developed the inverse Swiss cheese model of dumb luck. A number of factors contributed to me not suffering severe injury, if any of these were different I would probably be in a hospital right now instead of in my bed typing this post with both hands:
- I was running the drill press at relatively low RPM - more time for the glove to fail before causing severe injury
- I was using a wood drill bit - the sharp flutes likely contributed to the glove having a failure initiation point
- The type of drill press was small and electronically speed controlled - lower power and mechanical inertia available to cause injury
- I had not yet permanently affixed the drill press - allowing it to move and lowering the shock force on my hand
- The gloves were old an worn out - tore up more easily instead of pulling my hand further in
- My right hand interacted with the clockwise rotating drill from it’s left side - the hand naturally resists wrapping backwards around the drill bit, more chance for the glove to tear off instead of binding the hand more tightly to the drill
Typing these out I feel a bit nauseaous at the thought of how easily this could’ve been worse.
I knew these risks, after all, it’s how my grandfather lost his index finger.