 Glass coffee tables add a stylish look to many living rooms. But they pose a serious hazard. 15,000 are injured by glass furniture each year.
I never would have thought I could almost have died from sitting on a glass table, says David Juskow.
Juskow was watching television, when his table suddenly shattered beneath him. I get up and there's a huge piece of glass and I pull it out, which I guess I shouldn't have done, and I am bleeding to death, bleeding to death, the ambulance brings me to the hospital and I go into cardiac arrest.
Emergency room doctor David Markenson says he's seen many severe cuts from glass tables. Often it's a child who has been injured. Being a child, they're doing what they shouldn't have been doing, jumping on the couch. Lost their balance, fell onto a glass coffee table, breaking through it.
Consumer Reports' director of product safety, Don Mays, says there are no safety standards for glass tables, but there should be. He set up a test area to demonstrate the danger.
A table made of regular glass, which is also sometimes called annealed glass, broke into large jagged pieces.
Consumer Reports says far better are tables made of tempered glass or safety glass. When tempered glass breaks, it breaks into very small pieces. So there are no jagged edges, says Mays.
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