![]() The information is generated from actual consumer complaints as well as sampling of data providing by hospital emergency rooms, said agency spokeswoman Nychelle Fleming. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency charged with tracking complaints and issuing voluntary product recalls, uses a variety of statistical methods to estimate the number of injuries caused by thousands of consumer products to build a database it calls the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. There are scattered complaints about shower doors and tempered glass involving several manufacturers. It's important to note that there's nothing special about Kohler shower doors. I shudder to think about the injuries I might have sustained were this normal glass. My still-swollen right foot doesn't necessarily agree, but in truth, my injuries are remarkably negligible given the amount of glass that showered over me, and I am lucky that the tempering worked as well as it did. Or abusive treatment by consumers, such as rough openings and closings, could cause such a crack. The door could be incorrectly installed, rubber stoppers might be missing or cracked or the runner which lets the door slide is damaged. "It can happen for 100 different reasons," she said. ![]() ![]() Hours or days later, the door will then explode, creating the appearance of a spontaneous blow, she said. It's pretty amazing when you see it, how quickly it happens."Ĭristina, the Kohler spokeswoman, said that sometimes a small fracture will occur on the edge of a shower door that won't immediately cause it to shatter. "I've broken tempered glass just trying to remove it,” said Terry Love, a Seattle-area plumber. When tempered glass breaks, it leaves behind a pile of small pieces. As a result, tempered glass dropped on its edge will readily shatter. While it becomes much stronger and resistant to direct impact, it becomes much more susceptible to a side impact. When glass is heated in the tempering process, its tensile strength is altered. What would make shower doors suddenly explode? It turns out that their greatest strength – safety - is also their greatest weakness. Even so, I was picking small pieces out of my skin for the next day or so. 2 to get broken glass shards off my body. I had to figure out a safe way to climb out of the pile of broken glass without suffering more cuts, and then I had to shower in bath No. I had one fairly large gash on the top of my foot that bled profusely, perhaps because a piece of the door hardware fell on it. In my case, I was left with about 20 cuts - not much worse than paper cuts - along the right side of my body and on my feet. In doing research for this story, I found no reports of life-threatening injuries from a broken shower door. A shattered shower door will produce a pile of glass chips similar to the glass left in your back seat after a criminal breaks a car window to steal a GPS. It's important to note, however, that the doors are made of special tempered safety glass, required by federal, state, and local building codes and designed to break into small, relatively harmless shards. Interviews with building inspectors, glass companies and manufacturers - along with a quick Internet search for complaints - reveal that it's fairly common for bath doors to shatter, a tendency that isn't made clear in glossy brochures with beautiful images of modern bathrooms. The aesthetics come with a cost however, as I recently learned the hard way: Glass shower and tub enclosures can shatter without warning, endangering any person or pet in the path of the raining glass. ![]()
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