Nail guns claiming lives, causing harm

By ANDREW McINTOSH
THE SACRAMENTO BEE

last updated: April 13, 2008 03:24:47 AM

With a 2½-inch nail deep in his chest, construction worker Manuel Murillo slid into a pickup, bracing himself for a desperate seven-mile drive down a snowy Sierra road.

His friend and co-worker Salvador Cardenas was driving. When they finally got cell phone reception, Murillo, 30, called his wife in nearby Portola to tell her there had been an accident. He

had shot himself with a nail gun while working on a mountain cabin. And he was going to die.

"I love you," he said, before hanging up.

Murillo had been struck down by a popular tool of his trade -- the air-powered nail gun -- equipped with a mechanism that allowed automatic firing.

As the tool's popularity surged during the building boom of the 2000s, a Sacramento Bee investigation found, nail gun injuries also took off, despite decades of warnings from researchers and doctors that the guns are dangerous, especially in the automatic mode known as "contact trip."

Driven by compressed air, the brawniest nail guns can blast 30 nails a minute that travel as far as 490 feet per second, qualifying the nails as low-velocity missiles. In contact trip mode, with one pull of the trigger, they fire those missiles whenever the muzzle makes contact with a surface -- including heads, hands, eyes and chests.

But the tool's hazards largely have been unaddressed by regulatory agencies. Inspectors at Cal-OSHA, charged with protecting the state's workers, visit a fraction of work sites to see whether nail guns are being used safely. Typically, the agency investigates after an incident -- as it did with Murillo.

Cal-OSHA's efforts to promote safer firing systems have been derailed. Meanwhile, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has done little, even as its staff documented the growing injury toll among nonprofessionals.

Novice construction workers and journeymen carpenters, home do-it-yourselfers and even passers-by are among those getting hurt.

California companies reported 1,890 nail gun injuries leading to missed workdays from 2003 to 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That tally covers only a small portion of those injured, in part because undercounting is widespread, according to a 2006 report by the state Legislative Analyst's Office.

A more comprehensive national estimate found that 42,000 people with nail gun injuries -- more than 100 a day -- show up at U.S. hospital emergency departments annually. Others are treated at clinics or at home.

Treating the wounds costs the United States at least $338 million a year in emergency medical care, rehabilitation and workers compensation, according to a Consumer Product Safety Commission estimate. That's 10 times the cost of treating jigsaw, power sander or band saw injuries, and double the cost of treating injuries from handsaws.

Who gets hurt

Injury victims and their relatives accuse manufacturers of sacrificing safety to boost sales of the guns and the nails that go with them, which load into magazines or come in coils. The faster the tool, the greater its appeal -- and the more nails it uses.

That allegation is among those made by Murillo's widow, Brenda, who is raising the couple's three children.

Her wrongful death lawsuit against Hitachi-Koki U.S.A. accuses the toolmaker of selling Murillo a finishing nail gun that was negligently designed, defective and of "dangerous character and condition," according to a complaint filed in July in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Hitachi Vice President Benjie Hopkins declined to respond, citing the pending litigation.

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