Crash Victim Crusades for Air Bags in Autos : One-Woman Fight Is to the Point: ‘Seat Belts Aren’t Enough’

In April of 1980, life seemed to be going very much Annette Paluska’s way.

She had a job she enjoyed as an advertising and marketing consultant in Miami. She had a lot of friends and an active social life.

She taught tennis and played on the Avon circuit (a now-defunct minor-league professional circuit) in Florida, hoping one day to make it to the Virginia Slims’ women’s pro tennis circuit.

She had recently gotten her private pilot’s license, and had spent the previous football season as a cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins. She was looking forward to trying out for the cheerleading squad again the next year.

Near-Fatal Accident

But on April 27, that good life changed forever.

Annette Paluska had a head-on collision that nearly killed her. She suffered severe head injuries, brain damage and spent several months in a coma, several years recuperating.

“The paramedics who found me thought I was dead,” Paluska said during an interview at her sister’s home in Santa Monica, where she now lives. “I spent months in a coma, then in a vegetable state, where all I did was sit and drool. I was in the ozone. Then there was the baby stage, hyperactive, pig-out stage. It was all horrible for my family. I had a seat belt on, but it didn’t save me. It ripped from the floor in the force of the collision.”

Today, Annette Paluska is on a one-woman crusade--to have cars equipped with air bags as well as seat belts.

Paluska has appeared at press conferences about the issue with Assembly Speaker Willie L. Brown (D-San Francisco) and consumer advocate Ralph Nader this year, and has currently embarked on a letter-writing campaign to gain support for her cause from movie, television and sports personalities.

She also spends time writing magazine articles and opinion pieces for newspapers about the air-bag issue and appearing on TV, on talk shows and giving rebuttals to anti-air-bag editorials.

Paluska applauded Speaker Brown’s mandatory seat-belt bill that passed the state Legislature last weekend, and is expected to be signed shortly by Gov. George Deukmejian, but she still says she wants an air bag in her car as well.

“Only one out of a hundred people survives brain damage like I had,” Paluska said. “And only one of those three ever comes back to full reality. I was given a second chance. I represent all the brain-damaged out there in the ozone where I was. I speak for them. They can’t speak for themselves. I don’t want to see anybody go through what I did.”

Paluska went to Sacramento twice this year (February and March) to testify before the Legislature on behalf of having seat belts and air bags become mandatory equipment in autos in California. She also testified before a U.S. House subcommittee on the matter in April, along with Joan Claybrook, president of the Washington-based Public Citizen Inc., a consumer-rights group.

Claybrook, interviewed by phone, said she was impressed with Paluska’s testimony.

“I think what she’s doing (Paluska’s crusade) is just right,” said Claybrook, who has been speaking in support of mandatory air-bag installation in cars for 15 years. “She is a very intelligent and articulate individual. She is very good at expressing the pain and plight of being an auto-crash victim without being overly emotional.”

Claybrook also lauded the passage of the new law by the California Legislature, which was supported by insurance companies and consumer groups. Even the auto industry withdrew its opposition to the bill before it passed the Assembly.

But Claybrook also took the opportunity to lambaste the auto industry for “not even offering it (the air bag) for sale as an option.”

Paluska agreed, saying adamantly, “I don’t want just a seat belt, that’s not enough. I want seat belts and air bags. They complement each other. Nobody who is dead can testify about how seat belts aren’t enough.”

Mercedes-Benz is the only auto manufacturer that offers air bags in its cars. Air bags are standard equipment on the Mercedes 500 series, and optional on a majority of its other models. Other auto makers have contended that air bags don’t work as effectively as proponents claim, are too costly (about $300 mass produced) and the public would resent the inclusion of safety devices over which drivers and passengers have no control.

The issue of air bags, the cushion-like devices in the steering wheel or dashboard that inflate on hard impact and were first patented in 1952, has long been a political and technical football.

The new California bill would require drivers to use seat belts beginning Jan. 1, and auto makers to install air bags or other automatic crash protections in California cars by 1989.

A $20 Fine

With the new state law, California drivers would face fines of $20 for the first offense of not wearing a seat belt; $50 for subsequent offenses. Auto makers who do not install automatic crash protections in new cars sold in California after Sept. 1, 1989, would face fines up to $500 for each automobile sold in the state.

The California Office of Traffic Safety estimates that the new seat belt regulation, once signed into law, will save the lives of three California drivers each day.

“The part about ‘automatic crash protections’ worries me,” said Paluska. “What does that mean? That the auto industry will try to give us automatic seat belts instead of air bags? Automatic seat belts just are not good enough. That’s why I feel I have this mission (to promote mandatory air bags for cars)--because the American people just don’t know the facts.”

Paluska insisted that the general public has not been informed about the actual safety factor of air bags, especially when used in conjunction with a lap-shoulder seat belt.

Safety Statistics

According to Ray Biancalana, administration manager for the Office of Traffic Safety, statistics from national tests show that the lap-shoulder belt is 57% effective in a car crash; the air bag, 50% effective in a frontal crash.

“Used together, though,” Biancalana said, “they have a combined benefit and are 70% effective in a frontal crash, which has the highest fatality rate of crashes.”

Ironically, Paluska said, she had tried in 1974 to have an air bag installed in her General Motors Vega without success.

“Then, my insurance company, Allstate, was offering a discount if your car was equipped with an air bag,” she said. “I heard there was a place in Pompano Beach where you could get your car retrofitted with an air bag. I went there, but I couldn’t get one on my little Vega. They were only for Cadillacs and Toronados and other large luxury cars. That didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t now. Statistics show that we small car drivers are eight times more likely to be hurt than those in big cars.”

Last month Paluska began working in communications and marketing services for Alba Industries Inc., an office furniture manufacturer in East Los Angeles.

Paluska does not currently own a car, but she borrows her sister’s Karmann-Ghia to get back and forth to work. “It doesn’t have an air bag,” she said with a smile. “There isn’t one that would fit it.”

Tireless Worker

On promoting her air-bag cause, Paluska said, “I spend about 100 hours a week working on things for air-bag legislation. But I was lucky. I don’t think I would be here to do anything if I hadn’t had such a strong support system from my family and friends. My mother and father (Denise and James E. Paluska of Havasu City, Ariz.) actually lived at the hospital. It was lucky my father was retired, so they could do that.” Paluska’s father had been a coach and school superintendent in Illinois.

“Sixty percent of the people who die in car crashes in America--27,000 will die in car accidents this year--have head-on and frontal angle collisions like I had,” Paluska said. “And it is proven that air bags work in head-on collisions.”

After several months in the hospital in 1980, Paluska and her parents lived for more than a year in an apartment in Miami, where they helped her repair from the damage of the accident. The Paluskas brought their ailing daughter to California to live with her sister, Kay, in 1982.

Annette Paluska began an exercise program, riding a stationary bike and lifting weights, to get back in shape after the accident. “I was always into sports,” she said. “So I was in pretty good shape, but you can’t believe how even muscles in good condition can atrophy so quickly.”

Marketing Manager

By early 1983, Paluska, who earned a master’s degree in communications at the University of Illinois, was able to take a job as a marketing manager for a systems company.

With her new job, Paluska felt she was getting her life back together again, even though she always will suffer from double vision because of the head injuries she suffered in the accident. “I can hold things in single vision,” she said. “But if I move my head, look up or down fast, I see things double.”

Paluska was able to work only four months before she began developing severe pain in her legs. “I procrastinated, but it wasn’t going away,” she explained. “So I went to the hip specialists at Dr. Robert Kerlan’s Southwest Orthopedic Medical Group. The surgeons there believe that my bones were disintegrating as a result of the medications they had to give me after the crash to keep me alive. They call the disease avascular necrosis. That’s dead bones.”

Her left leg was operated on in December, 1983; her right one in March, 1984. “It is a controversial operation. They call it core decompression drilling. They drill through the bone into the femur to let the blood circulate better.”

Paluska has recuperated enough to begin her exercise program again, and tries to swim daily at a nearby public pool. She still often has to use a cane, though, to walk.

Snapping her fingers, Paluska continued: “My life stopped like that. And it will never be the same again. Pretty much everything has changed. Sports are over forever. So is flying, and dancing. I can twirl my cane, instead of a baton. But I don’t like to complain. I am here, and I am lucky I can speak out. . . .

“You’re only alone, really alone when you’re born or when you die, except if you’re out in the ozone,” she added. “I spent a little time like that alone, and I don’t want to see anybody have to go through that.”