Roller & Press Entrapments: When Machines Don't Forgive

A maintenance supervisor steps onto a platform to check a jammed auger. The metal corkscrew begins spinning. Within seconds, only 23 pounds of his body are recovered. In a food processing plant, a 19-year-old climbs into an industrial kettle during cleaning. Coworkers hear screams but can’t reach him in time. At a sawmill, workers are told to clear jams by reaching into machinery—with the power still on—because “it would take just too long” to shut down properly.

These aren’t freak accidents. From our litigation experience representing injured workers and their families, we see a consistent pattern: roller and press entrapments happen when engineering failures, procedural breakdowns, and management decisions converge around one deadly moment. Once contact is made with rotating rollers or press components, escape is nearly impossible. The force is immense, the motion continuous, and the outcome catastrophic.

What “Caught in Rollers or Presses” Actually Means

Workers get pulled into rotating rollers or trapped between press components during operation, cleaning, adjustment, or maintenance. The machinery involved is far from exotic. In most cases, it’s the common equipment that processes America’s most widely used goods. Printing presses, metal stamping presses, paper and textile rollers, laminators, calendars, plastic molding equipment, and food processing machinery all create what OSHA calls “in-running nip points”—areas where two parts move together with enough force to draw objects inward.

These machines typically don’t stop when something goes wrong, and the kinds of accidents this creates are some of the worst in any industry. For example, there are stories of workers in sawmills getting pulled into wood chip augers, or textile workers getting caught while cleaning lint from rollers. In printing facilities alone, nearly half of all injuries involve “roller in-running nip, contact with moving parts, and entanglement.” Among power press operators, 49% of injuries result in amputation.

The tasks are often mundane—clearing jams, cleaning rollers, making adjustments, performing maintenance, reaching into active machines—but the consequences are life-changing.

Engineering Failures: The Guards That Weren’t There

Machines should be designed so workers can’t reach hazard points. OSHA’s machine guarding standard (29 CFR 1910.212) requires one or more methods of guarding to protect workers from “point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks.” There’s a simple test: if a worker can reach over, around, under, or through to a dangerous area, the guarding is incomplete.

Yet investigations consistently find the same problems:

• Guards removed for access and never replaced.
• Equipment delivered without nip-point guards despite manufacturer claims they were included.
• Plexiglass shields that workers can simply reach around.
• Companies operating decades-old machines with no preventative maintenance.

Emergency stop mechanisms fail for predictable reasons. Controls are positioned where trapped workers can’t reach them, or response times lag too long for fast-moving equipment. In other cases, safety systems get disabled or bypassed to speed production. Some accidents come from machines lacking rapid-stop capability, so they can’t respond quickly enough once entanglement begins.

Fixed guards, interlocked guards, presence-sensing devices, two-hand controls—these engineering controls work when implemented. The problem is they’re too often not there when workers need them most.

When Lockout/Tagout Procedures Fail

Before any worker approaches machinery for cleaning, maintenance, or repair, lockout/tagout (LOTO) procedures should render that equipment completely dead. OSHA standard 29 CFR 1910.147 requires employers to shut down equipment, isolate it from all energy sources, and apply locks that prevent accidental restart. Done correctly, OSHA estimates lockout/tagout prevents 120 deaths and 50,000 injuries annually.

But in workplaces where production pressure overrides safety, management often neglects proper LOTO procedure. Some managers have explicitly instructed workers to clear “two-second jams” without following the five-step lockout process. Supervisors have distributed locks to workers only when OSHA inspectors arrive. Workers have been told the machines “can’t be turned off” during cleaning because downtime is too costly.

A report on an Alabama sawmill illustrates how this plays out. Over 20 years, federal inspectors repeatedly cited the company for lockout/tagout violations, receiving over 180 OSHA citations and $5.3 million in fines across 20 years. Twenty-five percent of the violations were deemed “willful”—meaning management knowingly disregarded worker safety “for monetary gain.” The owner’s priority, according to managers: “He doesn’t like to see the mill down and not in production.” Workers prayed before starting their $9-an-hour shifts. Three died anyway.

Management’s explanation: “Our job is to keep the mill running and not let the mill be down any longer than we have to.”

When machines are left energized during maintenance—when incomplete shutdowns occur, when unexpected restarts happen because another worker doesn’t know someone is inside the equipment, when training is inadequate or nonexistent—lockout/tagout failures directly cause the entrapments we fight to prevent.

What Investigations Have Uncovered

When federal or state inspectors arrive after a roller or press fatality, they typically find:

• Missing or defeated safeguards. Guards removed and never reinstalled. Interlocks bypassed. Safety systems disabled because they interfered with speed.
• Normalized violations. What should be rare shortcuts—reaching into active machinery, working without lockout, clearing jams with power on—have become standard operating procedure. Sometimes for years.
• Training gaps. New hires get minimal instruction. Workers don’t understand energy control procedures. Supervisors never learned proper protocols themselves.
• Prior warnings ignored. Earlier injuries on the same equipment. Near-misses that didn’t result in hospitalization so they went unreported. Employee complaints that managers dismissed.

The most damaging findings are the historical ones. In cases we’ve litigated, discovery reveals that companies received previous OSHA citations for the exact hazards that killed someone. They paid fines, signed settlement agreements promising corrections, then changed nothing. The same unguarded nip points. The same lockout failures. The same production pressure.

Production Costing Lives Is Management’s Failure

At the top of every fatal entrapment investigation sits a pattern of disastrous management decisions:

• Prioritizing production speed over engineering controls
• Operating aging machinery without upgrades
• Relying on worker awareness instead of physical safeguards

And when warning signs appear—near-miss incidents, damaged guards, employee complaints, prior entanglements—they’re ignored. A metal stamping plant once saw repeat finger amputations on the same machine, with OSHA finding the company “consciously placed employees at risk of serious injury to increase production.” A printing company worker was strangled when her clothing caught on rotating parts that lacked guarding.

Families often ask us why these things happen. The answer, tragically, is simple greed. Proper machine guarding requires investment, following lockout/tagout slows production, and maintenance windows cost money. Negligent management will choose to skip these critical expenditures until someone dies—or a firm like ours forcing them to change.

Why Roller & Press Fatalities Continue

The right machines and safety systems exist. The OSHA standards are decades old. Yet according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, approximately 2,000 press operator amputations occur annually—10% of all workplace amputations. Improper lockout/tagout still causes one in ten industrial accidents.

Roller and press incidents are preventable with known solutions:

• Fixed guards that physically block access to rollers
• Presence-sensing devices that stop machines when hands enter danger zones
• Two-hand controls requiring operators to be clear of the point of operation
• Enforced lockout/tagout that actually isolates energy during maintenance

Fatalities persist because, to companies, the cost of proper safeguarding exceeds the risk of fines and litigation. OSHA’s maximum penalty for a willful violation causing death is approximately $165,000—less than half the maximum daily fine for a Clean Water Act violation. Under federal law, causing a worker’s death by willfully violating safety rules is a misdemeanor carrying a maximum six-month sentence.

The calculation only changes when enforcement mechanisms or civil liability make that choice financially untenable.

What Workers & Families Should Know

If you or a family member suffered injury or death from roller or press entrapment, know this:

• These incidents are highly preventable. Every investigation reveals violations of known standards, failures to implement existing safeguards, or management decisions that prioritized production over safety.
• Machine design and management decisions determine outcomes. The entrapment wasn’t caused by worker carelessness—it was created by engineering failures, absent safety systems, and normalized violations that management allowed to persist.
• Investigations can uncover responsibility. OSHA reports, internal company documents, maintenance records, prior citations, and witness testimony establish what companies knew and chose not to fix. These materials are often essential in litigation.
• Families have rights. Beyond workers' compensation, you may have claims against equipment manufacturers, third-party maintenance contractors, or others whose negligence contributed to the death. The remedies available depend on the specific circumstances and jurisdiction.

The conversations we have with families are difficult. But one thing is clear from every case: when a worker dies in a roller or press entrapment, it’s because someone decided that speed mattered more than safety. That calculation must change—through enforcement, through litigation, and through holding companies accountable for the real cost of putting production over lives.