When a light is taken into this coal-filled atmosphere, it bursts into flame, causing a violent explosion. Sprinkling the mines, forcing a fine spray of water through the air of every part of the mines, it is thought, will prevent this class of accidents, which have furnished long lists of killed and injured each year.
Reports show that one miner is killed and several injured for every one hundred thousand tons of coal mined. The mining accidents of one year total 2,500 killed and 6,000 seriously injured.
Other industries do not cause such wholesale injuries, but there are thousands of individual accidents each year where the injury varies from mangled fingers to death.
When the cause is failure to provide suitable safeguards to machinery, or to warn employees of danger, the penalty to the employers should be made severe, so that no consideration of money will prevent them from taking precautions. More often, however, the injury is due to the carelessness of the men or to the fact that they try to run machines with which they are unfamiliar.
Manual training schools, night schools for working-men, with a short apprenticeship in the running of machinery and an explanation of the dangers, will go far to prevent this class of accidents, but the fact will still remain, that often those who are most familiar with machinery become careless and are more liable to injury than beginners.
The number of accidents that have been added to the world's list by automobiles, both to those riding and to persons who are run over by them, is great and is in a large measure due to carelessness in handling the machine or to reckless driving.
The entire number of accidents in the United States, including railway accidents, reaches the immense total of sixty thousand killed and many times that number injured. A most appalling waste of life and labor value!
Professor Ditman says, "Of 29,000,000 workers in the United States over 500,000 are yearly killed or crippled as a direct result of the occupations in which they are engaged—more than were killed and wounded throughout the whole Russo-Japanese War. More than one-half this tremendous sacrifice of life is needless."
Until the last quarter of a century there was a large addition to the death rate each year from the blood poisoning following operations and injuries making open wounds. It was not until the discovery of the germs which cause septic poisoning that deaths from these causes could be checked. The use of antiseptics, such as carbolic acid, alcohol, and various other preparations, the boiling of all surgical instruments, and the boiling or baking of all articles used in the treatment of open wounds and sores has reduced the death rate at least one-half.
The rate could be lowered much more if all sores were treated as surgical cases and carefully sterilized from the beginning. About eighty-five deaths out of every hundred from these causes might be prevented.