Surprising hazards across the house and tips on how to preserve secure

Helen Davey was leaning into the storage unit beneath her ottoman-style bed when the faulty mattress platform slammed shut, trapping her neck beneath its weight.

Without warning, the pistons holding the mattress aloft had failed, holding the 39-year-old’s neck against the bed’s base.

Minutes later, Ms Davey was dead.

The coroner ruled the cause of death to be ‘positional asphyxia’. In other words, the mother-of-two had suffocated due to the weight of the bed crushed against her windpipe.

This tragic accident, which occurred earlier this summer in County Durham, has raised serious concerns regarding the safety of our homes and the mod-con furniture we fill them with.

According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), around 6,000 people die from accidents in the home across the UK every year. Children under five and over-65s are most at risk.

Whether we like to admit it or not, our homes are accidents waiting to happen.

So just how safe is your home, and which hidden dangers lurk in the place you feel most secure?

Dishwashers

In 2003, Jane McDonald was loading the dishwasher in the house where she was lodging in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, when she slipped, fell and impaled herself upon upstanding kitchen knives in the cutlery holder.

The 31-year-old, described at her memorial service as a ‘bonny wee lass,’ was rushed to hospital but died in her brother’s arms shortly after admission.

Shockingly, a 12-year-old boy died in similar circumstances in 1997.

And it’s not only upstanding knives that pose a risk. In 2019, a 60-year-old retired jockey died after she fell on a metal ‘eco’ drinking straw which pierced her left eye and perforated her brain.

And don’t forget that dishwashers – along with tumble dryers and washing machines – are among the top three most common kitchen appliances to catch fire. The combination of electric wires, heating elements and water create a lethal triptych.

In January this year, electrical retailer Currys had to apologise to a couple from Denbighshire in Wales after their dishwasher burst into flames, filling the kitchen with smoke. The couple said it was ‘pure luck’ the fire was spotted in time before spreading to the rest of the house.

Washing machines

When 29-year-old mother-of-five loaded the washing machine in her Liverpool home and started a cycle, she had no idea she’d just created a bomb.

But a matter of seconds later, as her 15-month-old son Brodie stared with curiosity through the window drum, the machine exploded shooting shards of glass across the utility room with the force of a hand grenade.

For a moment, there was silence. Then Brodie screamed. Amie rushed back into the room and saw her toddler covered in blood. For a moment she stood stock still in shock, and thought she was about to faint. And then her maternal instincts kicked in.

She swept up her son – who had injuries to his eye, neck, arms, hands and feet – and rushed him to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Thankfully, doctors were able to patch him up, even reattaching a finger that was hanging by a thread, but the accident has left young Brodie with lifelong injuries.

While exploding washing machines are rare, they come with other perils.

Last year, a three-year-old Parisian girl died from suspected suffocation when she climbed into a washing machine and the door automatically locked, leaving her trapped.

Furthermore, in 2020, the makers of Hotpoint and Indesit washing machines attempted to recall over half a million of their machines after they were found to have a safety fault that which made them prone to catching fire.

Lawnmowers

Each year around 300,000 people in the UK require hospital treatment for injuries sustained while tending to their gardens. But ahead of secateurs, hedge trimmers and axes, the humble lawnmower is the most dangerous tool, responsible for 6,500 serious injuries a year – 85 per cent of which involve men.

Each year 69 Americans are killed by the machines – more than the number claimed by terrorists and being struck by lightning.

The trouble with lawnmowers is the myriad different ways they can injure you. Incidents reported at UK hospitals last year included injuries from debris, such as pebbles and twigs, flicked up by the blades, contact with the spinning rotors, burns from skin contact with the engine and even falling off a ride-on vehicle while attempting a sharp turn.

Perhaps the most fatal danger posed by lawn mowers comes when using an electronic push-machine. If you mow over the cord, the blades – spinning at 200mph – will shred the live electronic wires in milliseconds, running a current through the machine and up your arms. The victim collapses immediately, their muscles going into spasm, their vision blurs and their hearing fails. They might just have time to feel burns across their palms before falling unconscious and – very possibly – never waking up.

And ahead of what is predicted to be a wet, dreary October, gardeners need to be more cautious than ever. Lawn care specialist, Moowy, has warned green-fingered Brits that mowing in wet conditions increases the risk of an inadvertent slip leading to injury.

Toasters

More people are killed globally each year by toasters, around 700, than by sharks, just 14 in 2023.

Most people know not to prod into a toaster with a metal object, risking a potentially fatal electric shock. But what very few people know is the importance of cleaning out the crumb tray beneath the device.

For this is one of the primary causes of toasters catching fire – the crumbs serving as kindling, igniting a blaze that can quickly engulf the home.

Just last month, fire crews rushed to a primary school in West Lothian after a toaster caught fire, leaving two staff members requiring medical attention.

Treadmills

In June this year, a 22-year-old woman stumbled on a treadmill in Indonesia and was thrown backwards through a third-floor window to her death.

Back in 2009, Mike Tyson’s four-year-old daughter, Exodus, accidentally strangled herself on a cord connected to her father’s home treadmill. And in 2015, Dave Goldberg, the husband of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, was found lying next to a gym treadmill on Friday at a holiday resort in Mexico with a blow to the back of his head. He had slipped on the treadmill – and later died in hospital.

These tragedies are far from isolated incidents.

In the summer of 2021, fitness firm Peloton recalled 125,000 of its treadmills across the US and UK – which had surged in popularity during the pandemic – after one of the machines was found responsible for a child’s death. Details on the fatality were mired in secrecy, but at the time a further 72 injuries were already claiming to be linked to the company’s treadmills.

While UK gym operator LA Fitness claims that only 2 per cent of on-site injuries are caused by treadmills, it’s abundantly clear than they pose a significant risk when kept in the home, especially around small children.

Heavy furniture

According to the National Child Mortality Database, ten children in the UK died as a result of falling objects between 2019-2022. However, last year alone, 1,500 people were admitted to A&E having been ‘caught, crushed, jammed or pinched in or between objects’.

The tragic case of Helen Davey – killed by her bed – is proof that it’s not only children at risk from heavy furniture. Indeed, a similar incident occurred in 2018 when 24-year-old Ateeq Rafiq was crushed by a reclining chair in a Star City cinema in Birmingham. After he knelt to look under the chair searching for his keys, the device malfunctioned, applying three quarters of a ton’s worth of pressure on to Rafiq’s neck, leading to a heart attack caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.

Meanwhile, Swedish furniture brand Ikea ended up paying out £35million to a family in California after a chest of drawers weighing 32kg fell on a two-year-old boy in 2017, suffocating him.

According to children charity Kids In Danger, about two or three children die in the US every month from falling furniture or appliances. Terrifyingly, one child every hour is taken to hospital with injuries from such an incident.

Curtain cords

For young children, the humble curtain cord can be a fatal accident waiting to happen.

In January this year, 23-year-old Natasha Ogden believed her toddler, Kane, was playing hide-and-seek as he stood motionless behind the blinds of her home in Greenacres, Manchester. It was only when she noticed he wasn’t moving that reality dawned. Kane had become entangled in the cord, starving his brain of oxygen. He died the day before his second birthday.

In 2013, 17-month-old Sophia Parslow was playing in the living room of her Gloucestershire home. Her mother left the room for four minutes to fetch something upstairs. When she returned, her daughter had been strangled by a blind cord that had become wrapped around her neck.

At the inquest, which Sophia’s parents found too traumatic to attend, the coroner said the young girl was likely trying to peer out the window when she became fatally entangled.

According to the Child Accident Prevention Trust, it can take just 15 seconds for a toddler to lose consciousness if a cord is wrapped tightly around their necks.

Stairs

Seven hundred people die each year in the UK from falling down the stairs. Horrifyingly, a further 43,000 people are hospitalised from doing so at a cost to the NHS of £5million a year, according to The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

People in their 20s are the third most likely to suffer a traumatising stair fall, behind infants under five and the over-85s.

One American study has found that young people’s choice of footwear, failing to hold the banister, taking two steps at once and using mobile phones while walking are some of the real reasons why they have become death traps.

The study also found women to be at greater risk of falling down the stairs than men, a fact the researchers attribute to women talking to one another while descending. Stairs are considered sufficiently hazardous that the British Standards Institution has a framework for their ideal construction to minimise the risk of injury. The formula for safe stairs accounts for the materials used, the angle and size of the steps and even the height of the handrail.

Bathrooms

In the bathroom, falls – typically due to a slipping on a wet floor – are the leading cause of injury. But research now suggests older people with low blood pressure are at risk when lifting the loo seat – bending down can quickly to do so can cause disorientation, imbalance and lead to a potentially lethal fall.