A Mom’s Vigilance Could Save Children’s Lives
When Evelyn Fortier went shopping for a car seat in suburban Virginia for her fast-growing infant son, the last thing she expected was that doing her homework would lead to a new federal law.
Leafing through a consumer guide in a bookshop a year ago, Fortier found information that struck her as a major gap in federal safety standards for child seats.
Government standards protect kids in child seats from head-on collisions but not from side crashes--even though the latter are deadlier, and other countries have seen the danger and instituted safeguards.
She also learned that federally mandated safety tests for child seats are stuck in a 1970s time warp. The seats are strapped onto a Chevy Impala back seat, vintage 1973, for crash simulations.
Fortier was disturbed by what she found, but unlike the average mom, she was in a position to act. As a staff lawyer for Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), himself the father of a 7-year-old, Fortier went to her boss.
“I was simply amazed,” she said. “Nobody drives an old Chevy Impala with a child seat in the back. I was also surprised that we didn’t offer side-impact protection.”
Dramatic improvements are expected soon for adults in side-impact crashes. Side air bags available in a growing number of new models have shown great promise in reducing head, neck and chest injuries. But side air bags in their current form are not recommended for children because of the risk of injury. Sen. Fitzgerald responded to Fortier’s entreaties by introducing a bill last February that directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to draft a side-impact standard for child seats and to modernize safety testing, create a simple rating system for child seats and carry out research and testing on the booster seats that are recommended for older children.
Last fall, at the height of public furor over the weaknesses in tire safety exposed by the Firestone recall, Congress added Fitzgerald’s proposals to a major safety reform bill quickly signed by President Clinton.
In the future, the government may require all child seats to be fitted with special material, like the Styrofoam now used in bicycle helmets, to protect kids in cars struck from the side.
Consumers Union lawyer Sally Greenberg said the child seat law is noteworthy because it was written by conservative Republicans who are usually averse to regulation. “It’s very unusual,” she said. “But these were things that probably should have been done a long time ago.”
Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., the bill’s House sponsor, agreed. “It was so crazy that we hadn’t updated this standard in 26 years, that even the staunchest conservative would say this needs to be fixed,” he said.
Death Rate Not Declining as Sharply for Children
Parents worry about strangers and school violence, but according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children over age 1. While cars are safer now for all occupants, the death rate has not declined as sharply for child passengers as it has for adults.
Head-on crashes have long been the main focus in auto safety, because they are the most common. But as better engineering improves survival rates in frontal collisions, attention is turning elsewhere. Studies now show that side crashes--though half as likely as head-on collisions--pose a major, and yet-to-be-resolved, hazard for children.
“Frontals are more common, but side impacts are more injurious,” said Kristy Arbogast, a biomechanical engineer who specializes in child safety. “Side impacts are a difficult problem because there is just so little between the child and the intruding vehicle.”
Arbogast is part of an unprecedented research project on child auto safety at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, analyzing thousands of State Farm Insurance cases involving kids in crashes. Recently published findings show that children are being seriously injured even in minor side-impact crashes. Overall, the researchers found that 42% of the serious injuries occur in collisions in which vehicles receive little or no damage. Head injuries are the most common.
Two 1999 cases from the study illustrate the challenges in addressing side-impacts. The accidents were virtually identical, but the outcomes were drastically different. Because of confidentiality rules, most of the identifying information has been withheld.
The first crash took place at an intersection in North Carolina. A 1993 four-door passenger car was broadsided on the right by a van. The car sustained significant damage between the right front and rear doors.
A 2-year-old boy was riding in a child seat secured on the right side of the back seat, near the impact. He suffered a minor bruise on the right side of his head. His mother, who was driving, and a 12-year-old sister in the front seat also escaped with minor cuts and bruises.
The second crash, of similar severity, took place in Pennsylvania. A 1994 four-door passenger car was struck on the right, also by a van. Again, the car sustained significant damage.
The driver suffered minor bumps and bruises and was able to get out without any help. But her 2-year-old daughter, secured in a child seat in the middle of the back seat, was unconscious and not breathing although she had been riding what is considered in the safest seating position for a child.
The mother gave her daughter mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the rescue squad arrived. The little girl suffered brain injury, broken bones in her face, a fracture of her lower left leg and was hospitalized for eight days. The care she received helped her avoid a long-term disability.
The puzzling fact that the second child was more severely injured even though she was farther from the impact “points to the complexity of the issue and highlights the importance of further study,” said Arbogast.
Almost as Many Deaths as in Head-On Crashes
Evidence from other studies also raises important concerns:
* Buckling up kids in the back seat--as parents are instructed to do--is no guarantee of protection in side crashes.
In 1999, the latest year for which statistics are available, almost the same number of children in the back seat died in side crashes as in much more frequent head-on collisions.
An analysis for The Times found that 228 children through age 12 were killed in side crashes in that year, only 10 fewer than the 238 who died in frontal crashes.
The study, which focused on crashes involving vehicles built in the 1980s and 1990s, was conducted by Maryland-based researchers Alice and Randy Whitfield.
* For smaller kids in child seats, a similar pattern of deaths highlights the urgency of improving design.
In 1999, 67 kids through age 4 strapped in child seats were killed in head-on crashes, according to federal statistics. In the same year, 71 similarly protected children died in side crashes. Again, because of the lower frequency of side crashes, the parity of the death toll is striking.
“We are concerned, and we are looking more carefully at side impacts,” said Stephen Kratzke, head of safety standards for the traffic safety agency. “We agree that the fact that there are roughly as many fatalities in front and side impacts to children in child seats means that we have to take a look.”
Crash studies prompted European countries to impose stricter design standards for child seats in the mid-1990s. Tom Baloga, president of Britax Child Safety Inc., which sells the European-style seats in the United States, said they feature higher sides known as “wings” and special shock-absorbing padding within their plastic shells.
In addition to Britax, which is headquartered in Britain, some American companies, including Fisher Price and Century, sell some seats that meet international standards. However, experts advise that the best car seat for any child is one that fits the child comfortably and can be properly secured in the vehicle. Locally, consumers can check with Torrance-based SafetyBeltSafe USA at (800) 745-SAFE or on the Internet at https://www.carseat.org.
Baloga said one accident in particular led to design changes in England: A child was killed in a side crash when a bolt came through the thin plastic shell of his car seat.
“What that illustrated is that you can’t just be concerned about frontal impacts,” said Baloga.
In a side crash, he added, “the first thing you want to do is contain the child within the seat. You accomplish that with the side wings. Then those wings need to absorb energy, and you do that by adding the padding.”
Traffic safety agency officials say they will closely evaluate the European standards.
One important area for the traffic safety agency to consider is whether child seats can be designed to work with side-impact air bags, a combination that could greatly improve safety for kids. Currently, child safety experts recommend that parents not place children near side air bags. However, no deaths or serious injuries to kids have been reported from side air bags, which are less forceful than front air bags.
“As technology develops, the potential exists for air bags to be protective for kids in side impacts,” said Arbogast.
The new safety law places strict demands on the traffic safety agency, which has been criticized for not moving sooner on child safety. The agency had the authority to upgrade the standards without an explicit order from Congress.
Under the law, the agency has to issue a new safety standard by the end of 2002. (Normally, that takes more than three years.) The agency must consider how to address not only side impacts, but also rear-end crashes and rollovers. It must evaluate whether to add test dummies representing a 10-year-old and an 18-month-old to the child dummies currently in use--newborn, 9 months, 3 years and 6 years.
It must test child seats in cars that are actually crashed, instead of relying solely on bench tests that replicate the physical forces of a crash. And it must launch a research program with the goal of improving booster seats, the new safety devices being recommended by safety experts and pediatricians in recent years for children who have outgrown car seats but are too small for adult lap and shoulder belts.
As for Evelyn Fortier, the congressional staffer who followed through on her concerns, her son, Thomas, will almost be 4 by the deadline for the new requirements.
By that age, he will probably be graduating from a child seat, but he will still need to use a booster seat. So Thomas could still well benefit from his mother’s persistence.
