Ryobi, the power-tools manufacturer, paid $2 million to a hardwood flooring installer who sued the company after he severely injured his hand using a Ryobi BTS-10 table saw, according to the Daily Hornet.
The man, Alex Mai, was using the table saw inside a home in South Philadelphia to cut a length of hardwood flooring when the wood came in contact with the back of the saw blade, causing a kickback, the Daily Hornet said. The kickback pushed his fingers into the saw blade, severing his middle finger immediately. Mai’s right index finger also suffered permanent nerve damage.
Mai’s lawyers claimed in the lawsuit that his injuries were due to a faulty guard design and the company’s failure to manufacture the saw with flesh-sensing technology, according to the report. Mai was 19 years old at the time and did not have experience using a table saw, but was told to cut a length of flooring, the report said.
Ryobi has paid settlement money to someone injured by its table saws before. Carlos Osorio required five surgeries after a Ryobi saw injured his hand while he was laying hardwood floors in 2006. A jury awarded Osorio $1.5 million, the Daily Hornet said.
Data from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission show table-saw-related injuries brought 33,400 people to the emergency room in 2015, and 92 percent of those injuries resulted from the user making contact with the blade. Half of all amputations associated with “workshop” products can be attributed to table saws, and the annual societal cost associated with blade-contact injuries is more than $4 billion, according to the CPSC.
The CPSC recently announced a rule it said would make table saws safer to users. The rule, available to read in the Federal Register, would require table saws to limit the depth of cut to 3.5 mm when a test probe, acting as a stand-in for a human finger, contacts the spinning blade at a radial approach rate of 1 meter per second.
The rule is open to public comments until July 26.
