A 10-year-old boy was impaled by a 13-inch-long piece of wood flooring when he fell while running through his home, according to a report from Houston's KHOU.com. He fell on his backside and a piece of the hand-scraped flooring, which had been installed two days before, came loose and impaled him from the bottom of his buttocks up to his waist. He was rushed to the hospital and had to have emergency surgery to remove the wood, which fortunately stayed close under the skin and didn't damage his muscles or nerves.
The family contacted the wood flooring company to pay their $5,000 medical insurance deductible, but it offered $500. KHOU.com contacted the company, Regal Hardwoods, which gave this statement regarding the incident:
"We feel terrible about what happened to this family. As long as the wood floor is used in the manner it was intended, a similar injury could never be experienced by another family. In this instance, the parents chose a wood floor that is hand-scraped to give it a distressed texture. It is designed to be rustic looking and was never meant for running and sliding. Although we cannot control what people do at home, running inside the home is never a good idea. Possible injuries can arise even from tile and carpet, such as slipping on tile and getting carpet burns from carpet. Moreover, the description of the boy running, falling, and sliding, sounds very much like he was play-sliding on the floor. As stated earlier, normal use of the floor would not produce such an injury if someone simply "fell" on the floor.
If anything is to be learned from this terrible incident, supervise your children at all times, even when at home. Flooring, whether tile, carpet or wood is not a playground. This injury could have been prevented."
The child's mother said she and her husband were in the room when it happened and told KHOU: "This could happen to any child, in any home, anywhere. As a matter of fact, the surgeon that did the surgery had had another case."
