According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, every year, more than 35,000 Americans suffer serious injuries while using table saws, with more than 4000 losing a finger. The economic cost alone of these injuries is more than $2.3 billion per year. The sad truth is that none of these injuries should have occurred and that all of them were entirely preventable. Flesh-detection technology has been available since 2003 which would completely eliminate these serious injuries, but saw manufacturers have refused to incorporate this technology into their saws.

In 2003, Dr. Stephen Gass and others petitioned the CPSC to enact performance standards that would reduce or eliminate injuries from contact with the blade of a table saw. Dr. Gass is the creator of a revolutionary technology known as SawStop that uses electrical current running through the blade of a table saw to detect skin contact with the blade. Upon sensing such contact, the SawStop system releases a heavy-duty spring that instantly pushes a block of aluminum into the teeth of the spinning blade, causing the blade to stop and then retract within 3-5 milliseconds. When activated, the SawStop technology will completely eliminate the possibility of serious injury; a saw user who in the past might have experienced a serious injury or amputation will instead receive only a small nick or scratch:

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The development of the SawStop technology in 2000 should have been the beginning of another American success story based on product safety and innovation. In fact, for some time, Dr. Gass was negotiating with power tool companies to license the SawStop technology so it could be added to their table saws. In fact, Gass was able to negotiate a contract with Ryobi, one of the world’s largest saw manufacturers. But when he noticed a typo in the contract and called Ryobi’s lawyer to get it corrected, the corrected contract never came. It seemed that Ryobi had gotten cold feet.

Around this same time, the large power tool manufacturers formed an unprecedented alliance to research and develop new saw safety systems. But rather than creating their own flesh-sensing technology or licensing Gass’s, the saw companies rejected the SawStop technology as unproven. Gass claims that he was told by one saw manufacturer that “safety didn’t sell.” He also believes that Ryobi and other big tool companies rejected his technology because they were afraid that adding it would make them more vulnerable to lawsuits filed by users injured by older saws that did not have the technology. For whatever reason, the big tool companies essentially “blackballed” Dr. Gass and refused to incorporate his important new technology into their table saws. Now, years later, it seems that the government and the court system may force their hand.

On October 5, 2011, the federal First Court of Appeals in Osorio v. One World Technologies, Inc., No. 10-1824, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 20174 (1st Cir. Oct. 5, 2011) upheld a $1.5 million verdict for Carlos Osorio, a Massachusetts man injured in a construction site accident involving a Ryobi table saw. The accident occurred when Osorio’s hand slipped while cutting along the length of a piece of hardwood flooring, causing his left hand to slide into the saw’s blade and leading to a severe injury to his hand. At trial, the jury heard about the SawStop technology that could have prevented Osorio’s injury. They also heard the defendants argue that the SawStop technology was too expensive and would unreasonably increase the cost of smaller table saws like the one Osorio was using. The jury rejected this argument and determined that Ryobi’s table saw was defective in design. The First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. The verdict in Osorio will undoubtedly apply added pressure to the big power tool companies to add the SawStop technology to their table saws.

Additional pressure may be coming from the federal government. On October 5, 2011, the Consumer Product Safety Commission unanimously approved a recommendation to begin the process of creating new performance standards for table saws that would require the reduction or elimination of blade contact injuries. In voting to approve the recommendation, one of the Commissioners stated as follows:

Shortly after I joined the Commission in 2009, I saw a demonstration of a braking mechanism for table saws, called SawStop, which would stop a saw blade instantaneously upon encountering someone’s finger or hand. This led me to take a look at the injury data for table saws. The injuries associated with this product are horrific – deep lacerations to the arms and hands, broken bones and, worst of all, amputations to fingers and thumbs. Injuries like these often leave victims facing long, painful recoveries as well as significant financial hardship and employment challenges. I have met a number of these individuals, and, as far as I could tell, every one of them was an experienced woodworker who made a single small misstep or had a momentary lapse in attention – with ghastly consequences. To my mind, small errors like these should not produce tragic results on such a grand scale. In the case of table saws, roughly 36,000 blade contact injuries occur annually, with about 10 percent of them resulting in amputations.

While a new federal regulation may be months or years away, we can only hope that the pressure put on the power tool industry by the CPSC’s recent vote and the verdict in Osorio will lead to the implementation of SawStop technology sooner rather than later. The tens of thousands of Americans injured every year while using table saws deserve nothing less.

If you have suffered a serious injury or amputation while using a table saw, you may be entitled to compensation. Please contact Heygood, Orr & Pearson at (214) 237-9001 to see if you may have a case.