I will readily concede that I am not an expert in industrial accidents, but I usually read in detail any well written analysis of a major accident that I find at a medium to reasonably detailed level. One thing you will very often find is that there is no single factor that could have caused the issue by itself. And that each fault is often fairly innocuous by itself. But too often three, four, or more of these fairly innocuous issues stack in a perfect storm, causing explosions, building collapses, airplane crashes, etc. I honestly wish that industrial accident post mortems were required reading in the data security industry, because it gives you a real world tangible appreciation for defense in depth, and how statistical clusters do result in things that are unlikely to all go wrong at once will in fact statistically all go wrong at once from time to time in the real world.
On top of that, while most of the power tools with blades should be producing chips too large to contribute, all the power sanders, and the multicam (cutting MDF) are capable of producing dust that between fine particulate size and potential concentration has the potential to cause more damage to property and life than if Hatchers were allowed to store 20 to 50 pounds of black powder.
Then consider that not counting the festool and other shop vacs, there are three dust collectors in the wood shop. Given that we have so many cases today where people don’t open blast gates when they start, or don’t close them when they are done, or fail to stop or start the collectors, or even willfully continue working when they know someone is taking the drum out to empty, consider the following scenario:
The system has gone live, everything is working as expected, and people start to rely on it. A few weeks, months, or years later, some of the switches/sensors start operating erratically. Maybe late at night people notice, because they are the only one using tools. But during the day, someone is using a tool hooked up to one dust collector, and someone opens a gate to a tool on the second dust collector, the system malfunctions and doesn’t start the second one. Let’s say the user is even conscientious enough to listen, and hears the other dust collector running. But because they have always been able to rely on the system, they don’t know which collector they should expect to be running, or even be aware that they can trace back the lines to see, because they may never have had to, or have become complacent about it, because the system always worked before. This is a far too real world scenario where the existence of such a system and its malfunction could be one of the dominoes leading to bad circumstances.
20 years ago, I probably would have been arguing that it couldn’t make things worse. Now, I fully agree that it can be an issue with the fire marshal, and that any fire engineer is going to want all aspects of the collection system to come from reputable manufacturers, and that any engineer asked to put his stamp on a system is likely to refuse or hesitate strongly if they are aware of a DIY system like this as part of the solution. But the biggest issue is that I am now well aware that systems designed to make things better, that can’t by themselves cause an incident, can in fact still be a contributing factor.
