Fatal and Nonfatal Rip Saw Injuries

Abstract

This paper deals with a fatal stab wound suffered by a 29-year-old man and nonfatal injuries of 35-year-old and 67-year-old saw operators. Rip saw is a machine that is specially designed for making a rip cut, a cut made parallel to the direction of the wood grain. Rip-saw-related injuries mostly occur when a person is struck by the cutting material, which usually involves splinters of irregular shape and diameter. When the splinter strikes the body diagonally, the injuries may include abrasions, lacerations, and cut wounds; in situations where the victim is struck directly, the most common injuries are oval-or star-shaped stab wounds with a varying width of abrasions around the wounds. Therefore, such injuries may come across as injuries produced by a knife-like instrument, which is an added difficulty in the interpretation of such injuries.A saw is a tool consisting of a tough blade, wire, or chain with a hard toothed edge. It is used to cut through material, very often wood though sometimes metal or stone (1,2). These days, there are many types of saws that differ not only in their use and source of power used, but also in the variety of injuries that they can produce either if a person gets into direct contact with the saw blade or if struck by the material that is sawed, or chipped parts of the tool (3). This paper deals with injuries suffered when working with a rip saw. The first case involves a fatal stab wound of a 29-year-old man while the second involves nonfatal injuries of 35-year-old and 67-year-old men. Case Reports Case 1The first case involves a fatal injury of 29-year-old man, who was struck by a wood splinter ejected from a rip saw. Immediately after suffering the injury, the victim managed to remove the splinter from his chest, but later collapsed and became unconscious. Despite timely and professional medical attention, he died.

Between the hammer and the anvil: An unusual power hammer fatality

“…The wound morphology depends on the projectile's velocity, size of the impact face and type of the tissues penetrated [4]. Work-related penetrating injuries are commonly linked to high-revolution rotating blade power tools like circular saws [5,6], angle grinders [7][8][9] and lawn mowers [10,11]. In such instances, the projectile is either launched as a detached tool component or mobilised as a deflected object with a potential to reach terminal velocity of a cartridge-driven projectile from handguns [11].…”