BuckeyeDennis wrote:At work lately, I've been spending a serious amount of mind-numbing time studying various safety standards for machinery, and working a with professional safety-standards consultantcy as needed. UL, NFPA, IEC, CSA et. al. Though details vary, there is one underlying theme. To wit, a single fault should not seriously endanger a human, unless there is just no way around it. After all, things do fail.
The underlying principle of all the standards is that there should be no significant danger unless two or more things fail simultaneously. And that is one whale of a lot less likely.
So yes, properly training the operator can generally prevent injury from almost any device imaginable. But humans are at least as fallible as machines. It's good to have a backup/redundant safety measure. As in, "I got your back".
Regardless of your SawStop leanings, their technology has undoubtedly eliminated the "there is just no way around it" exception.
Some years back I was at an OSHA meeting because two workers in three weeks had caused major damage to themselves and we were in jeopardy of being shut down. It was determined that each worker had caused their own accidents, however OSHA had determined that our company needed to do something different. I wanted to tell them "you can't cure stupid" but they would have said I did not do an adequate job of training and / or applicant screening (which may or may not have been the case). I was just far enough down and up the responsibility ladder that no matter what, it was going to be my fault.
I spoke when I shouldn't have but told the people from OSHA that if they could find what ever it was, training, equipment, job seeker pool or anything else so that this would not happene again, I would implement it(though I did NOT have that authority). Their reply was it was not their responsibility to determine what actions to take.
As a result, I sat with some of the engineers and we developed a fall prevention system that is still in use today. The company owner made a great deal of money selling the system because his was the only game in town and OSHA made the other contractors use that system.
As I read this thread, I wonder about the forces (and forcing) of change versus the volunteering of change and wonder if the legal wranglings of SawStop have hindered in the long term the quality of woodworking safety or enhanced what we will see. No opinions, just cogitation.
What does this add to the discussion? Probably nothing. We can never know the outcomes of the future because of changes or lack of change, in the past.
Be well,
Ben
