"hand stuck in a machine....."

The human hand is amazing. It consists of 27 bones (including the 8 bones of the wrist). Taking into account the other associated structures (nerves, arteries, veins, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joint cartilage, and fingernails), the potential for a variety of injuries exists when trauma involves the hand. A majority of our plants require hand protection (in the form of gloves) when on the factory floor. Nevertheless, hand injuries still occur with some regularity. The hand injuries vary from cuts and lacerations to crushing type injuries. Specific types of gloves have minimized the cuts and lacerations that were so commonplace in our industry a number of years ago. The injuries resulting trauma by a blow or a crushing weight still occur with regularity. Here is a recent story involving a hand injury.

An employee at aluminum company in Southeast United States was injured just before 8 a.m. one morning during the week of October 23, 2015 after getting a hand stuck in a machine, local Fire Department spokeswoman said.

The fire department sent two trucks and seven people to respond to the plant to ensure enough manpower, local Fire Department spokeswoman said.

No other information was available. An aluminum company representative at the plant was unavailable for comment that morning.

The Aluminium Plant Safety Blog prays that the worker recovers fully from their physical and mental injuries. Hand injuries are rarely forgotten. Simply because we use our hands throughout our daily activities. Hand scars remind us forever of the incident that caused them.

During our plant visits we are commonly asked to walk through the plant and note any safety issues that may be viewed. Some walk throughs take an hour, which is not bad. Where others can take 4+ hours. So during our walk we see lots of employees, we always note what PPE they are wearing. We have noticed that hearing protection and gloves are the most common PPE that are not worn by factory floor workers. Why? There are a myriad of reasons but most frequent response is “I forgot”. We have seen plant managers who will walk through their plant with a spare pair of safety glasses, a pocket of ear plus, and spare pair of gloves. So, when a worker is seen not to be wearing the proper PPE, the plant manager can politely point out the importance of wearing PPE. Afterwards the plant manager give the worker the PPE that they were missing. This interaction between the plant manager or safety manager, etc. to a worker who is missing PPE is so very important in creating an atmosphere where safety can flourish. We have seen two extremes. The above mentioned situation is positive. We unfortunately have seen a plant where the safety officer would “write up” a worker who was missing PPE. Would you like to guess which plant had a better working environment and statistically was safer? Yes the first situation where the interaction is friendly vs. the last interaction which could be summed up as “enforcement”.

We’ll update this incident when with further information if it becomes available.