We recently received an email from someone who works with tree crews for a county in California, who thinks our ChipSafe technology should be outfitted on every wood chipper. Here’s what the email said:
We recently had a near miss where an employee got careless and complacent and stuck a hooked or J shaped branch into a, Morebark 1621 chipper.
The hooked end grabbed him from behind and tossed his 215 lb. frame onto the deck of the chipper infeed in a split second.
He stated that he was so shocked and frightened that the stop bar and the last chance ropes were not even in his thought pattern at the time, all he could think to do was brace himself against the pull of the infeed rollers.
Luckily the crew was doing what they were trained to do and a coworker/safety watch hit the reverse bar and saved him.
We are going to retrofit the unit with ChipSafe because even with a safety spotter in place, if that person takes their attention away for a fraction of a second a person could get drawn into the machine before they could act.