The Price of a Moment’s Forgetfulness at the Mill
After finishing his shift at the Tacoma mill, a worker suffered a horrific injury when he walked into the path of a circular saw.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
With two ribs and his left shoulder blade cut in two and one of the upper vertebrae cut, John Carmel, an employee of the Tacoma mill company, lies at the Fannie Paddock hospital in a critical condition. Late yesterday afternoon, Carmel came into contact with a circular saw, and that he was not killed outright is little short of a miracle. Carmel, with a number of other employees of the mill who had just finished work, was walking down an incline to the lower floors. Near the foot of this incline there is a circular saw. Carmel says he forgot that the saw was there, and when he reached the foot of the incline, he raised up and it cut through his body as if he had been a piece of timber. Fellow workmen dragged him away and he was taken to the mill hospital, where Dr. Grant S. Jinks and Dr. F. J. Stewart were called to attend him. Later, he was taken to the Fannie Paddock hospital. Carmel has a wife and five children and lives at Twenty-eighth and A streets. Today the injured man is reported to be in a very critical condition.
“Carmel says he forgot that the saw was there, and when he raised up... it cut through his body as if he had been a piece of timber.”
Workplace safety in Tacoma's early industrial era was often a matter of individual vigilance rather than systemic protection. The brutal reality of mills, docks, and factories defined the physical geography of the city, leaving behind a legacy of industrial hazards that were only addressed by the rise of organized labor and safety regulations decades later.
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