He Chose the Saw
Caught in the feed rolls of a Seattle mill, O. Lepper saw only one way out — and fed his own arm into the blade.
Facing the alternative of losing either his hand or his life, O. Lepper, a Seattle millman, deliberately fed his arm against the edge of a saw, severing his right hand above the wrist. He had stooped down to remove the accumulation of sawdust in front of his machine. The sleeve of his right arm was caught in the feed rolls. He saw that either his body or his hand would be forced against the edge of the saw and determined to sacrifice the hand.
“He saw that either his body or his hand would be forced against the edge of the saw and determined to sacrifice the hand.”
The lumber mill was the engine of Washington's economy and one of the most lethal workplaces in America; men were maimed by feed rolls and open saws as a matter of routine, and compensation for a severed hand was often nothing. Lepper's split-second arithmetic — count the hand against the body — is exactly the calculation that modern machine-guarding and lockout rules exist to make unnecessary. The mills are largely gone from the Seattle waterfront, but the argument over who pays when a worker is pulled into a machine has never gone away.
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