Investigative Report: Nail gun safety under fire as injuries soar

With a 2 1/2-inch nail deep in his chest, construction worker Manuel Murillo slid into a pickup truck, bracing himself for a desperate seven-mile drive down a snowy Sierra road.

His friend and co-worker, Salvador Cardenas, was driving. When they finally got cell phone reception, Murillo, 30, called his wife in nearby Portola to tell her there had been an accident. He had shot himself with a nail gun while working on a mountain cabin. And he was going to die.

"I love you," he said, before hanging up.

Murillo had been struck down by a popular tool of his trade – the air-powered nail gun – equipped with a mechanism that allowed automatic firing.

As the tool's popularity surged during the building boom of the 2000s, a Sacramento Bee investigation found, nail gun injuries also took off despite decades of warnings from researchers and doctors that the guns are dangerous, especially in the automatic mode known as "contact trip."

Driven by compressed air, the brawniest nail guns can blast 30 nails a minute that travel up to 490 feet per second, qualifying the nails as low-velocity missiles. In contact trip mode, with one pull of the trigger, they fire those missiles whenever the muzzle makes contact with a surface – including heads, hands, eyes and even chests.

Yet the tool's hazards have been largely unaddressed by regulatory agencies. Inspectors charged with protecting the state's workers at Cal-OSHA visit a fraction of active work sites to see whether nail guns are being safely used. The agency more typically investigates after an accident has occurred – as it did with Murillo.

Cal-OSHA's efforts to promote safer firing systems also have been derailed. Meanwhile, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has done little, even as its staff documented the growing injury toll among nonprofessionals.

Novice construction workers and journeymen carpenters, home do-it-yourselfers and even passers-by are among those getting hurt.

California companies reported 1,890 nail gun injuries leading to missed work days from 2003 to 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That tally includes a small portion of those injured in part because undercounting is widespread, according to a 2006 report by the state Legislative Analyst's Office.

A more comprehensive national estimate found that 42,000 people with nail gun injuries – more than 100 a day – show up at U.S. hospital emergency departments annually. Others are treated at clinics or at home.

Treating the wounds costs the United States at least $338 million a year in emergency medical care, rehabilitation and workers' compensation, according to a Consumer Product Safety Commission estimate. That's 10 times the cost of treating jigsaw, power sander or band saw injuries, and double that for handsaws.

Who gets hurt

Injury victims and their relatives accuse manufacturers of sacrificing safety to boost the sale of the guns and the nails that go with them, which load into magazines or come in coils. The faster the tool, the greater its appeal – and the more nails it uses.

That allegation is among those made by Manuel Murillo's widow, Brenda, who is raising the couple's three children.

Her wrongful death lawsuit against toolmaker Hitachi-Koki U.S.A. accuses Hitachi of selling Murillo a finishing nail gun that was negligently designed, defective and of "dangerous character and condition," according to a complaint filed in July in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Hitachi Vice President Benjie Hopkins declined to respond, citing the pending litigation.

On April 19, 2006, Murillo was installing pine paneling inside a remote vacation home owned by Michael James Flynn, a Rancho Santa Fe attorney. Cardenas was helping and Murillo's oldest son, Carlos, 10, had tagged along.

Working on scaffolding 7 feet off the ground, Murillo and Cardenas shared the Hitachi gun. At one point, Cardenas recalled during a tearful interview, he heard the tool fire and Murillo yell. When he turned to look, Murillo was grabbing his chest.

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• Call The Bee's Andrew McIntosh at (916) 321-1215.