Yale student dies from lathe!!!

pjf134

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A yale student dies after her hair got caught in the lathe at 2: 30 am in the chem lab. I seen this on PM site under general. Check new haven register for details.
Paul
 
Unfortunately from the details posted on PM, seems that she was working late and possibly alone, and to top it off was not addressign proper safety precautions. Long hair, ties, loose sleeves and jewelry are strick no-no's when working around machinery.

Walter
 
When I was in engineering school no one was allowed to use the equipment unless there were at least 2 people in the room. A rule I wish I could follow now.

I'll bet that there will be some new rules at Yale this week.

Randy
 
The report said she asphyxiated. Must have had long enough hair to get pulled in against something crushing her windpipe. Slow spindle would not just yank a handful out. I've seen that before. Pain and blood.

Too bad, really. If someone else had been there, perhaps she would have lived to tell about it.
 
Tony in the link that I put in here this afternoon, 2:39 PM, there is a picture of her, and yes her hair is very long in that photo.

She was a very talented girl according to the article.

Randy, I agree and was talking about it with my GF on the way home from picking her up from work. I am alone in this shop for hours at a time, sometimes there is one of the kids home upstairs but often it is just me, interspersed with the occasional client.

Now I have an advantage in that I have been doing this for awhile and I can negate many of the dangers, but not all. Yes it would be nice to have a second person around at all times too, but not always possible. In a school shop like that, yes, it should be mandatory. Now since the EMS was called it is possible that there was somebody else there, not like she was found at 8;00 AM when they opened up the school for the morning.

Work and play safe guys

Walter
 
A promising life cut short :(

I appears that she was at the machine late at night, and perhaps no one was near enough. I'm sure she yelled out for help as much as she could. This is also a warning against working around machinery while fatigued. I'm sure we've all done it, and perhaps gotten away with it, but it is definitely an additional risk. It's pretty well accepted that fatigue and drunkeness aren't all that different while driving a car, so would be similar with machinery. I know I have pulled some double and triple shifts to get a job out, and then driven to Houston to deliver...then back home. I was a bit younger then, and almost infinitely stupider.
 
knudsen link=topic=1702.msg10183#msg10183 date=1302718713 said:
Awww that sucks. That's what happens when you take shop out of HS.

It's a tragedy for sure, but I have to agree with Jon. They stopped teaching wood and metal shop, so kids have no clue how to handle machines. When I was in grammar school, we had wood shop, and they taught us to handle a radial arm saw, which is pretty dangerous, especially for kids. We were taught- keep everything out of the path of the machine- tie hair back (kids had long hair back then, boys and girls). If the teacher thought you were a wiseass, you never saw the key to that machine. Not to be sexist, but that girl had no business sitting there at the lathe with cascading hair flowing down her shoulders and back. That is how she was found. She probably leaned in to see, and it yanked her in. Kids need to be taught.

Now her family's lawyers will sue Yale. Go figure.

Regards,

Nelson
 
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