Garage Door Accidents Part 2

Garage door openers like has been said before have become a near staple of modern life. At this point if you own a home without an automatic garage door opener and you live somewhere in the suburbs or at least out of the urban centers of apartments you are an outlier statistically. Garage door openers make our garages more usable and convenient and our whole homes safer from a security perspective. What you may not know however is that accidents happen with garage doors that can become dangerous to you and your family. There is a lot of power needed to close a big heavy door and if that power is misused or gets put into the wrong spot then people can get hurt. While the garage door certainly isn’t the most dangerous thing in your house by a long shot it is important to know what to do if something happens with your garage door and your family or a pet for instance. This is certainly something that we don’t like to think about, but it is something that can happen so it is always better to be prepared for the worst case scenario.

If you have professionally installed and maintained garage door and garage door opener and have taught your children how to be safe around their garage door then you really don’t have anything to worry about. You have done the most you really can to prevent injury to yourself and your family and so shouldn’t worry about anything happening. Going over the dangers of your garage door with your children is important as well as making sure that your children know that your automatic garage door opener (while it is super cool) is not in fact a toy. Aside from this there is not much you can do after installation without buying things to really increase your safety readiness.

When you get your garage door installed or if you have a garage door professional come by the house for maintenance every so often one thing you can do to avoid accidents is to ask for any of the latest safety technologies they might recommend. They will know the latest tools on the markets to keep you and your family safe and so will be able to suggest something if they think that it really does help you stay safer. Nowadays garage doors have a number of necessary safety features that make them safer than they used to be. Things like garage door sensors and automatic reversal make your garage door tons safer than when they were originally introduced and new technologies continue to be developed to keep us safer. 

Another way to make sure that no garage door accidents occur is to make sure that you are not misusing your garage door in anyway. When you get your garage door installed or buy a home with a garage door opener you may want to read up on the safety features that the garage door opener has and some of the ways that you are supposed to use the garage door. Knowing and exhibiting the safest way to use your garage door will help others see how to safely use it an so your family should hopefully learn from your actions. Garage doors and garage door openers may seem like a boring piece of machinery that is essentially the same everywhere, but it has the power to do some real damage to a person or even a car and so should be operated with a bit of respect.

So you did all this stuff and you got unlucky. You accidentally somehow closed the garage door on someones foot and your garage door sensors were misaligned so the garage door closed all the way down on their foot leaving them howling in pain. What are you ever to do? First what you will want to do is discern whether the garage door is all the way closed on the person’s foot or the garage door has simply stopped because it came in contact with something before it was done closing. If the former another safety mechanism of your garage door opener has malfunctioned and you should certainly feel very unlucky, but now isn't the time for that. You will want to chance pressing the opener button again and hope that the garage door lifts back up. If the garage door opener’s automatic reversal option has malfunctioned then you are slightly luckier and should try to slide the foot out from under the garage door. This may be tough, but it beats chancing crushing the foot further. Either of these situations are highly unlikely, but after the foot has been freed then you will want to start seeking medical attention for whatever damage has been done. The amount of force that can be behind a garage door opener can certainly be enough to do serious damage to a bone and so the hospital is most likely going to be where you end up. 

If all of this happens and you end up back from the hospital and everything is more or less fine aside from a few scrapes and scares then it is time to get in touch with somebody about getting your safety mechanisms looked at and possibly replaced. This type of thing can only really happen if everyone involved is oblivious and all of the safety mechanisms malfunction, but there are certainly times when people improperly operate garage door openers or things can malfunction. It is never a bad idea to be overly prepared for “disaster” to strike so keep these sorts of tips in the back of your mind. When the safety or the health of you or your family is on the line it is never a bad idea to brush up on what the best practices are.