SHANNON VINNICK
Sales Associate/REALTOR®
Realty Executives Oceanside
As in the article;
"In the insurance business, we get a lot of claims from accidents," said Laura Adams, an insurance analyst for Clearsurance. "Keeping people safe helps prevent claims and injuries," she said of the company's motive behind the report. "We wanted to remind them to be careful."
Here are more of the report's findings, which are based on figures from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission:
Home improvement injuries accounted for 3% of all ER injury visits in the United States, or 290,599 trips to the emergency room in 2020; 8% of those patients were injured seriously enough to be admitted.
Fingers were by far the most injured body part (117,026), followed by hands (37,308) and eyeballs (34,827). Youch! The neck was the least commonly injured body part. I assume that's because spouses wringing each other's necks falls into another category.
Lacerations led to 127,486 ER visits, followed by fractures at 35,917. Most baffling, internal organ injuries accounted for 7,456 visits. What happened there?
Collectively, power tools — from workshop table saws to cordless drills — were involved in more than one-third of all injuries, followed closely by manual tools (hammers, screwdrivers and other tools you don't plug in).
Since the report also found that total ER visits from DIY-related injuries had reached a 10-year high, and that spring, as in right now, is when home improvement projects peak, I thought this would be a good time to have a little safety chat.
What all this boils down to is this: You want the sense to take on the home improvements and repairs you should do yourself, the humility to hire someone else when you should, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Here's a clue. Before you tackle a project on your own, answer this question:
Injuries (and other bad outcomes) happen when a) we do something we're not qualified to do, b) we don't have the right equipment or protective gear, c) we are being cheap, d) all of the above.
