This incident occurred to the father of the environmental manager of one of our ADM facilities. He was working in his shop on their farm in upstate Iowa on Thursday, September 4th. He was using a grinder with a wire wheel and he was using his safety glasses as well. When he stopped grinding, he took his glasses off. He saw a spot he missed and picked up the wire wheel and turned it on but failed to put his safety glasses back on. A loose strand flew up and landed squarely in his eye. He was taken to his local medical center where they gave him some sedatives and sent him on to the Mayo clinic. Four hours later they performed surgery on him to remove the wire. During his recovery from surgery, he aspirated vomitus into his lungs and was placed into intensive care for a day. He was released from the hospital after 3 days and is expec ted to make a full recovery but with some vision impairment that will be correctible by glasses or contact lenses (he did not need these before the incident). The wire strand punctured his eye to a depth of ½ inch. They tell us this picture will make the ophthalmology text books!
LESSON LEARNED
If this incident does not convince you to A
LWAYS use your PPE, then maybe nothing will. This is an extreme case where failure to use eye protection could have been life threatening. I am sure this person feels very fortunate that this incident did not result in the complete loss of an eye.
