Failing Tires Made During Plant Strike, Ford Says

Officials of Ford Motor Co. said Sunday that failure rates for Firestone tires made at Bridgestone/Firestone’s Decatur, Ill., plant spiked dramatically in 1994 when the plant was hit by a bitter strike and was operated for nearly a year by replacement workers and supervisors before veteran tire makers began trickling back.

Ford, which has used millions of the suspect tires on its Explorer sport-utility vehicles and other light trucks, said failure rates for tires made at the Decatur plant were overwhelmingly higher than for other Firestone plants. It released its analysis of complaints about the tires on Sunday in defense of the decision to limit the recall to an estimated 6.5 million of the tires.

Meanwhile, several former Decatur plant workers, testifying in accident suits stemming from tire failures, said that quality control problems were common at the plant, apart from the flood of inexperienced replacement workers.

But several plaintiffs lawyers who have sued Firestone and Ford--and who have called for a wider recall of the tires--questioned the intense focus on the Decatur plant, saying it was being made a scapegoat for wider problems with the tires and their use on Ford Explorers.

Workers at the Decatur plant also say they have been singled out unfairly, pointing out that failure reports also involve tires from other plants. But some have told The Times that if there were quality problems, they were probably due to heavy turnover at the plant from 1994-96 in the aftermath of the strike.

“People with inexperience were in there throwing them [the tires] together,” Joe Roundtree, who retired in 1996 after 30 years at the plant, told The Times on Sunday.

The recall announced last week involves about 3.8 million 15-inch Firestone Radial ATX and ATX II tires produced in Decatur and at five other Firestone plants. Bridgestone/Firestone has also recalled all of 2.7 million Wilderness AT 15 inch tires produced in Decatur--but has not recalled millions more of the Wilderness tires produced in its other plants.

“The overwhelming majority of complaints about Wilderness tires came out of Decatur,” Ford spokesman Ken Zino said Sunday. He said data from complaint reports show the other plants producing the model “are producing nearly perfect tires.”

Ford said it was releasing its analysis to explain why the tire maker, in consultation with Ford, had placed the boundaries of the recall where it did. Wilderness tires from other Firestone plants will be used to replace the recalled tires, but the recall is being conducted in phases, and Ford announced Friday that it has authorized its dealers to provide other makes of tires to customers who fear waiting until the replacement tires become available.

Firestone has not acknowledged its tires are defective and said it agreed to the recall as a precaution. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating, but it may be months before the probe is complete. The agency has received about 300 reports of tire failures, allegedly leading to at least 46 deaths and dozens of injuries.

The tire maker acknowledged Sunday that failure complaints were excessive for tires produced in Decatur during the ’94 strike and its aftermath. But Bob Wyant, the firm’s vice president for corporate quality assurance, said he did not believe high turnover was responsible, “because of the training processes that we have in place, and have had in place.”

The Washington Post reported Sunday that several former workers in depositions or written statements had cited long-standing quality control problems that they said continued up to the time they left the plant in mid-’90s.

They alleged, among other things, an excessive use of solvent that they said could compromise tire quality, and a practice of using an awl to lance blisters in tires.

Clarence Wood, a worker at the plant until 1996, was quoted as saying that when plant inspectors “complained about tires not being right, the response from management would be, ‘You don’t understand the tire business’. . . . We knew the tires were bad,” said Wood, who could not be reached Sunday for comment.

In a statement Sunday, Firestone dismissed the allegations as those of disgruntled former employees. “The Decatur plant adheres to stringent standards of quality control where every tire is subject to strict inspection by both people and machines at every step of the manufacturing process,” the company said.

Wyant said puncturing blisters in tires and using a curing process to repair them is a standard practice at Firestone and other tire companies.

A current employee at the Decatur plant, who would speak only anonymously, said tire blisters still are sometimes punctured and the tires shipped out of the plant without the proper repairs being made.

Several product liability lawyers and safety activists have called for including all 15-inch Wilderness tires in the recall and extending it to certain models of 16-inch tires. They charged that the emphasis on the Decatur plant was an attempt to divert attention from wider problems of faulty design.

Tire consultant Richard Baumgardner, who analyzes tire defects in lawsuits, said that 47 tire failures involved in the recalled models, and he has not seen clear signs of bad workmanship.

“I see weakness in the tires, but I don’t see overt evidence of poor construction,” he said. The problem “seems to rest in the inability of the tire to [hold up] at high temperature.”

Baumgardner said the 47 failures mostly involved tires on Ford Explorers, and resulted in 23 deaths and 85 injuries. He said 28 of the tires that failed were produced in Decatur, and the others at several other Firestone plants.

Tab Turner, a Little Rock, Ark., lawyer who has filed lawsuits against Firestone and Ford, said that of 15 tire failure cases he has examined, 11 involved tires produced at other Firestone plants.

Many failure reports, and a growing number of lawsuits, involve use of the suspect tires on Ford Explorers. And some tire experts and lawyers have said that low inflation pressures may have contributed to some of the failures.

Firestone recommends the tires being inflated to 30 pounds per square inch, whereas Ford had advised Explorer owners to maintain the tires at 26 psi--until the past week, that is, when the auto maker began to harmonize its recommendation with Firestone’s by calling for a range of 26 psi to 30 psi.

Experts say lower tire inflation would tend to put more stress and heat on tires riding at highway speeds, thus making them more likely to fail. And Firestone plant workers point out that the firm’s testing and grading procedures are based on the recommended 30 psi.

Ford has said it advised the lower tire pressure to provide a smoother, more car-like ride on the vehicles’ stiff truck frames. But lower pressures would also make them less prone to rollover in quick steering maneuvers. Because of their high center of gravity, SUVs have higher rates of rollover than passenger cars.