Granted this was in 2011...
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/...s-in-machine-shop-accident.html?smid=fb-share
Yale Student Killed as Hair Gets Caught in Lathe
By LISA W. FODERAROAPRIL 13, 2011
As a Yale undergraduate majoring in astronomy and physics, Michele Dufault was used to extreme physical environments. She worked on underwater robotic vehicles last summer as a fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. She also traveled to Houston as part of a team of undergraduates chosen by NASA to perform a plasma physics experiment in reduced gravity.
But it was a rudimentary machine — a lathe in a campus laboratory — that erased what everyone imagined to be a brilliant future for Ms. Dufault, who also found time to mentor girls interested in science and to play saxophone in Yale’s precision marching band.
On Tuesday, just weeks from graduating, she toiled late at night inside a machine shop in a chemistry lab, as she had for weeks while working on her senior thesis: investigating the possible use of liquid helium for detecting dark matter particles. Ms. Dufault, 22, was killed when her hair became caught in the lathe, whose rotating axis is used to hold materials like wood or metal being shaped.
Students and staff members were overwhelmed by the news on Wednesday, and met in small groups to share their grief. Linda Koch Lorimer, a Yale vice president and its secretary, called the death a “terrible accident” in a letter to students, and said counselors were available. A candlelight vigil was held Wednesday night in the courtyard of Saybrook College, the residential complex where Ms. Dufault lived on the New Haven campus.
“She was incredibly passionate about every sort of science,” said Joe O’Rourke, a fellow astronomy and physics major and member of the physics team. “She was the hardest-working person I know.”
Connecticut’s chief medical examiner ruled the death an accident, citing the cause as asphyxia due to neck compression. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration said it would investigate; Ted Fitzgerald, a spokesman for OSHA in Boston, said the agency had jurisdiction over the lab because Yale employees also use its equipment.
Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, said in a statement that the university would also review “the safety policies and practices of laboratories, machine shops and other facilities with power equipment” operated by undergraduates, in both science and arts buildings. Until the review is complete, he said, undergraduates will have access to those places only during set hours, and monitors will be present.
Photo
Michele Dufault
Mr. O’Rourke said the machine shop in Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, which he also uses, always had a staff member present during daytime hours. But many students use the shop at night; Dr. Levin said that other students who were working in the building found Ms. Dufault’s body and called the police.
The chemistry department’s Web site says access to the machine shop is “strictly limited” to those who have completed an introductory shop course. Yale lists safety precautions online for another machine shop on campus, warning students: “If you have long hair or a long beard, tie it up — If your hair is caught in spinning machinery, it will be pulled out if you are lucky.”
Ms. Dufault was taking an advanced course on machine shop protocols this semester, Mr. O’Rourke said. And for the NASA reduced-gravity experiment, she helped write a 60-page document on safeguards.
“She’s always been very careful,” he said. “That’s why I was shocked that this happened. I worked with her in that lab and always saw her taking the safety precautions.”
Manfred Philipp, a chemistry professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, who had no direct knowledge of the Yale accident, said lathes and similar equipment were notoriously hazardous.
“You have to be really careful around a machine like this because it has immense power,” he said. “The lathe has revolving moving parts, and if your hair gets stuck in that, then your head would be pulled toward the machine.”
Ms. Dufault, who grew up in Scituate, Mass., had planned to pursue a graduate degree in ocean science. At the Noble and Greenough School in nearby Dedham, she was remembered as “one of the most precocious students whom her teachers ever encountered.”
“Her mind, her sense of curiosity, her perceptiveness, her sensitivity and her enjoyment of what she did were extraordinary,” said Robert P. Henderson Jr., the head of school. “She was a true intellectual.”
Correction: April 16, 2011
An article on Thursday about a Yale student who was killed in a lathe accident in a campus laboratory misstated the location of Lehman College, the employer of a professor who was quoted about the danger of lathes. It is in the Bronx, not Queens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/...s-in-machine-shop-accident.html?smid=fb-share
Yale Student Killed as Hair Gets Caught in Lathe
By LISA W. FODERAROAPRIL 13, 2011
As a Yale undergraduate majoring in astronomy and physics, Michele Dufault was used to extreme physical environments. She worked on underwater robotic vehicles last summer as a fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. She also traveled to Houston as part of a team of undergraduates chosen by NASA to perform a plasma physics experiment in reduced gravity.
But it was a rudimentary machine — a lathe in a campus laboratory — that erased what everyone imagined to be a brilliant future for Ms. Dufault, who also found time to mentor girls interested in science and to play saxophone in Yale’s precision marching band.
On Tuesday, just weeks from graduating, she toiled late at night inside a machine shop in a chemistry lab, as she had for weeks while working on her senior thesis: investigating the possible use of liquid helium for detecting dark matter particles. Ms. Dufault, 22, was killed when her hair became caught in the lathe, whose rotating axis is used to hold materials like wood or metal being shaped.
Students and staff members were overwhelmed by the news on Wednesday, and met in small groups to share their grief. Linda Koch Lorimer, a Yale vice president and its secretary, called the death a “terrible accident” in a letter to students, and said counselors were available. A candlelight vigil was held Wednesday night in the courtyard of Saybrook College, the residential complex where Ms. Dufault lived on the New Haven campus.
“She was incredibly passionate about every sort of science,” said Joe O’Rourke, a fellow astronomy and physics major and member of the physics team. “She was the hardest-working person I know.”
Connecticut’s chief medical examiner ruled the death an accident, citing the cause as asphyxia due to neck compression. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration said it would investigate; Ted Fitzgerald, a spokesman for OSHA in Boston, said the agency had jurisdiction over the lab because Yale employees also use its equipment.
Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, said in a statement that the university would also review “the safety policies and practices of laboratories, machine shops and other facilities with power equipment” operated by undergraduates, in both science and arts buildings. Until the review is complete, he said, undergraduates will have access to those places only during set hours, and monitors will be present.
Photo
Michele Dufault
Mr. O’Rourke said the machine shop in Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, which he also uses, always had a staff member present during daytime hours. But many students use the shop at night; Dr. Levin said that other students who were working in the building found Ms. Dufault’s body and called the police.
The chemistry department’s Web site says access to the machine shop is “strictly limited” to those who have completed an introductory shop course. Yale lists safety precautions online for another machine shop on campus, warning students: “If you have long hair or a long beard, tie it up — If your hair is caught in spinning machinery, it will be pulled out if you are lucky.”
Ms. Dufault was taking an advanced course on machine shop protocols this semester, Mr. O’Rourke said. And for the NASA reduced-gravity experiment, she helped write a 60-page document on safeguards.
“She’s always been very careful,” he said. “That’s why I was shocked that this happened. I worked with her in that lab and always saw her taking the safety precautions.”
Manfred Philipp, a chemistry professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, who had no direct knowledge of the Yale accident, said lathes and similar equipment were notoriously hazardous.
“You have to be really careful around a machine like this because it has immense power,” he said. “The lathe has revolving moving parts, and if your hair gets stuck in that, then your head would be pulled toward the machine.”
Ms. Dufault, who grew up in Scituate, Mass., had planned to pursue a graduate degree in ocean science. At the Noble and Greenough School in nearby Dedham, she was remembered as “one of the most precocious students whom her teachers ever encountered.”
“Her mind, her sense of curiosity, her perceptiveness, her sensitivity and her enjoyment of what she did were extraordinary,” said Robert P. Henderson Jr., the head of school. “She was a true intellectual.”
Correction: April 16, 2011
An article on Thursday about a Yale student who was killed in a lathe accident in a campus laboratory misstated the location of Lehman College, the employer of a professor who was quoted about the danger of lathes. It is in the Bronx, not Queens.
