State Urged to Require Child-Safety Design for Cigarette Lighters

The man responsible for getting the federal government to ban lawn darts is now trying to get the state of California to require that all cigarette lighters sold after 1991 be child-resistant.

In the two years since David A. Snow’s 7-year-old daughter died after being struck in the head by a lawn dart, he has founded the Michele Snow Foundation in Riverside and become a child-safety advocate.

“I learned that lawn darts were just the tip of the iceberg,” Snow said.

A product that caught Snow’s eye about six months ago was the disposable cigarette lighter. Americans use 500 million disposable butane lighters annually, and last year the devices started fires that killed about 125 children age 5 and under and caused $60 million in property damage, according to federal government statistics.

In 1987, Orange County reported that 28 lighter-ignited fires were caused by children, resulting in five injuries and about $325,000 in damage, but no fatalities, according to the state fire marshal’s most recent figures.

2 Deaths in Orange County

This year’s Orange County statistics, however, will include at least two deaths: two babies were killed in a fire June 8 at a Huntington Beach day-care home, which was started by a child playing with a lighter. Snow hopes the tragedy will spur state lawmakers to pass a bill that was introduced in May to require that all lighters sold in California be child-resistant by 1992.

However, that legislation is opposed by the national trade association of the cigarette lighter industry, which hired a lobbyist to try to defeat the bill in its initial hearing before the Assembly Government Organization Committee, said Lori Zamora, an aide to the bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles).

Committee action on the bill was recently postponed until this fall so legislative staff can consult with state fire officials and research the issue in more detail.

Lobbyists for the Lighter Assn. in California and Washington were not available for comment on Friday.

‘Happy Medium Elusive’

But in a letter from association President Michael A. Schuler to a Philadelphia television station, Schuler said the industry has been working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission to develop a child-resistant lighter.

“Lighter manufacturers face the dilemma of creating a design that will deter small children, yet still be functional for adults,” Schuler wrote. “That happy medium is elusive, but our members will keep striving to find a workable design.”

In the letter, Schuler also complained of news stories that publicized the hazards of cigarette lighters without mentioning the fires started by matches. According to figures from the private National Fire Protection Assn., Schuler said, children playing with matches cause about twice as many fires as children playing with lighters.

However, these statistics are disputed by federal officials, who believe that lighters and matches cause about the same number of fires. California statistics on matches and lighters were not available.

“The true danger of match-related fire deaths caused by children playing becomes startling when you learn that consumers use lighters four times more frequently than matches to produce a flame,” Schuler wrote. “This means that the ‘comparative risk’ of using matches is many times greater. . . .”

Snow finds such arguments irrelevant.

“You talk to them about lighters and they start screaming about matches,” Snow said. “It’s disgusting. They want to throw the spotlight off them. . . . If we can do something about the lighters, we should do something and save a hundred lives.”

While child-resistant cigarette lighters are not available commercially, at least one entrepreneur has taken out a patent on such a device. Matthew Loveless of Westland, Mich., has developed a lighter that requires the user to line up arrows--like those on child-proof bottle caps--to ignite the flame. Loveless has modified the metal wheel that strikes the flint to ignite the flame so that the wheel locks after every use.

“It costs less than a penny to make this modification and I can do it in about 15 seconds on my dining room table,” Loveless said.

Loveless discovered how to create a child-resistant lighter through a freak accident 10 years ago at the automobile manufacturing plant where he used to work. A tiny piece of metal that flew from a welding machine landed on the lighter in his shirt pocket and stuck to the lighter’s metal wheel.

“I tried to light my cigarette and thought I had bought a defective lighter,” Loveless said. “Once I’d gotten home, I saw what had happened.”

Last year, Loveless submitted 15 prototypes of his invention to the Consumer Product Safety Commission for testing, but he said the experiments have not yet begun.

In 1985, Diane Denton, a burn-unit nurse in Louisville, Ky., petitioned the commission to require that lighters be made child-resistant. Since then, the agency has issued a “safety alert” warning parents to keep lighters away from children, but has not moved to regulate the industry.

Cigarette lighters are manufactured according to voluntary standards set by the American Society for Testing Materials, which has addressed flame height adjustment, flaring, flame control and flame extinction. The society, whose board includes several representatives of the lighter industry, also requires manufacturers to place the warning “Keep Out of the Reach of Children” on the packaging.

However, the Consumer Federation of America says these standards are inadequate.

“It is apparent that the industry-dominated task group responsible for writing the standard . . . will not seriously address this hazard until they perceive a threat of regulatory intervention,” according to a 1987 report from the group.

Rather than waiting for the federal government to act, Snow said he is lobbying for individual states to pass cigarette-lighter standards. California’s Assembly Bill 408 will be back for another committee hearing this fall, Snow said, and New York lawmakers are considering introducing similar legislation.

“When this industry is faced with several states promulgating their own standards,” Snow predicted, “they’re going to go back and beg the federal government to come up with a standard to preempt all these state standards.”

FIRES WHERE CHILDREN WERE PLAYING WITH LIGHTERS--1987

Fire Property Content +Total +Total County Incidents * Loss * Loss Injuries Deaths Imperial 2 0 0 0 0 Inyo 1 0 0 0 0 Kern 21 $90,150 $42,300 1 0 Los Angeles 49 289,912 126,048 4 0 Orange 28 216,150 107,420 5 0 Riverside 61 163,650 30,300 2 0 San Bernardino 57 343,600 54,800 1 0 San Diego 30 348,057 83,312 7 0 San Luis Obispo 3 0 0 0 0 Santa Barbara 10 29,074 12,544 1 0 Ventura 12 78,750 17,900 0 0 STATE TOTAL 476 2,274,018 776,244 39 2

BY TYPE, STATEWIDE

Fire Property Content +Total +Total Incidents * Loss * Loss Injuries Deaths Unknown 1 0 0 1 0 Building 264 2,169,735 720,018 40 2 Grass 149 4,037 63 2 0 Vehicle 13 6,600 400 2 0 Refuse 28 650 100 0 0 Outside structure 7 5,100 5,400 0 0 Outside storage 3 1,056 463 0 0 Mobile home 6 86,650 48,950 2 0 Other 5 190 450 0 0

+ Includes civilians and firefighters * Dollar loss estimated by fire department--not all fire reports contain a dollar loss. Source: Office of the State Fire Marshall--California Fire Incident Reporting System