As with anything mechanical or electrical, there is a safety risk involved in using a lawnmower, especially the ride on type. There are some simple precautions that you can take to reduce the chance of an accident happening on your watch. Firstly, the person operating the mower should be wearing safety glasses, closed toe shoes (preferably sturdy boots) and trousers, not shorts or a skirt that could get caught on levers or handles. Wearing ear defenders is a good idea if the engine is loud, but listening to loud music on headphones is likely to be a distraction and you might not notice people trying to get your attention in an emergency. Check the lawn for toys and other debris that might be lying in long grass before you start cutting. This can cause a lot of damage to your lawnmower, but more importantly, shards of debris flung from a lawnmower can cause serious injury to those in the vicinity.
Young children should be indoors while the lawn mower is in use unless there is another adult supervising them, although this is not ideal. Children should never be passengers on a ride on mower, as they can fall off very easily. No one under the age of 16 should operate a ride on mower, and only then after training by an adult. The blades should not be touched unless the lawn mower is completely turned off, and any safety devices on the machine should not be tampered with.
In Walnutport, Pennsylvania, a four-year-old child was seriously injured after sliding underneath a reversing lawn tractor on wet grass. A helicopter took the boy to hospital with a leg severed at the thigh. A five-year-old girl was airlifted to hospital in Glenville, New York, after badly injuring her foot while she tried to spray her father with a water pistol while he was mowing the lawn. He was unaware that she was there and accidentally struck her with the push-along mower. These examples demonstrate how important it is to keep children away from lawn mowers, and to teach them from an early age that although it might look like a fun toy, it is a potentially lethal machine. Showing them the blades, and where they are located may be enough to keep kids away from the lawn mower at all times. I know that approach worked on me as a youngster!
Using ride on mowers on sloping ground, or where there are drops in the levels between grassed areas, is a risky business. We recently looked at the remote control mowers used by city officials in Pittsburg, Kansas, and it seems that this technology is needed in a few other areas of America, after one man died and another was injured after flipping a ride on lawn mower. Both incidents occurred in churchyards, one in Waterloo, Iowa, where the maintenance man flipped off a wall and was pinned under the machine. It began to catch fire, and he was pulled from underneath by bystanders. In Newburgh, New York, cemetery groundsman Franklin Rose died after his machine tipped over. It is unclear whether the accident killed him, or whether he had suffered a medical incident that then caused the accident. In Omaha, Nebraska, another man was injured after being pinned under his ride on lawn mower and the same happened to a man in Charleston, West Virginia, whose lawn mower overturned while he was mowing a hill part of the lawn.
Uneven terrain, especially steep inclines or very bumpy areas can be a real challenge for most lawn mowers. It is important to know what your machine is capable of, and to do your homework when it comes to safety, otherwise you risk serious injury and worse.
