Quote:
Originally Posted by TheMercenary
I saw a video the other night of some kid who was killed when one of the paint ball canisters failed. A bit blew off and hit him in the neck.
|
Sounds like he may have had a faulty burst disc. It's a little piece of safety equipment installed on all compressed air and co2 tanks that is designed to fail when the pressure inside the tank becomes dangerously high, releasing the gasses from the tank quickly and preventing a hazardous over-pressurization. If that malfunctioned and did not fail as it was designed to, then some other part of the tank must have eventually succumbed to the over-pressurization and catastrophically failed, sending pieces of the metal or fiberglass tank flying at high speed no doubt.
Paintball is a very safe sport if safety guidelines are strictly adhered to. All you may end up with at the end of a hard day playing are some bruises/welts and minor scrapes from crawling and sliding around on the ground. When players and field operators/owners/refs neglect their safety equipment like facemasks, barrel blocking devices, gas system, etc., serious injuries, and in this case death, can and do occur. That said, this could have been entirely not the kid's fault. Could have been a cheap tank, not hydro-tested recently, or the fill station operator damaged/overfilled the tank placing this kid in harm's way. I will definitely encourage my future kids to play paintball. It's an exciting, physically demanding, team-building sport that is statistically safer than many other popular sports when safety standards are adhered to.