Posted on 10/28/2007 6:01:06 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
(They're designed to enhance children's safety, but unsecured, unoccupied seats can become dangerous projectiles in a high-speed crash)
George Clark clicked his seat-belt buckle and relaxed in the back seat of his friend's car as they headed home from a Boy Scout leader training weekend in Kiel.
It was a warm June afternoon, and Clark, 52, chatted with the other two dads sitting up front.
Clark paid no attention to the empty booster seat beside him.
Then a car darted across the highway in front of them and they hit it, going close to 50 mph.
Clark doesn't remember what happened during the impact. But severe injuries to the left side of his head and face indicate the unsecured booster seat became airborne and bashed into him, pulverizing his cheekbone, shattering his jaw and causing other injuries.
Before the crash, Clark, of Mequon, had never considered a booster seat to be a hazard. When his kids were small, child safety seats were always secured to the car. He doesn't remember having booster seats, which first hit store shelves in 1991.
Nothing on the booster seat next to him that June afternoon - no warning label or anything - suggested it should be belted to the car, he said.
Though some safety experts say it amounts to common sense, buckling in an empty booster seat isn't the first thing many drivers or passengers consider.
"It's something people don't think about," said Lynn Clark, George's wife. "This should go on Good Morning America to tell the world (booster seats) can become projectiles and seriously hurt people."
As laws change requiring children to stay in booster seats until they're as old as 8, the likelihood of such injuries will increase - unless parents become aware of the danger and fasten the seat belt even when their child isn't in the car, experts say.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does not keep data on how often people are injured by unsecured booster seats or even on how often people are hurt by any loose cargo.
But researchers have found that in a collision, especially a frontal one, unrestrained cargo flies forward with a force exponentially greater than its weight. At 55 mph, a 20-pound parcel exceeds 1,000 pounds of force. A can of peas or the family pet can cause serious injury or even death.
Anecdotally, injuries from airborne booster seats are on safety officials' radars, experts say.
"It's an issue that's grabbed enough attention to change the way they do training," said Matt Wolfe, a highway safety specialist with the Transportation Safety Institute, an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
People who teach firefighters and other child-restraint safety technicians are instructing them to teach parents to be sure to remove the booster seat when it's not in use or buckle it up, Wolfe said.
Graco, one of the country's largest makers of booster seats and other children's products, says it does instruct motorists not to leave a booster seat in the car unfastened.
"Graco clearly states in the car seat's instruction manual that the seat needs to be secured in the car when not in use," says spokeswoman Stacy Becker, in a written statement. "The car seat itself does not include this labeling."
The P.I. Team found that the same goes for Evenflo, Eddie Bauer, Cosco, Safety 1st and most other popular booster seat brands. The only booster seat maker the team could find that posted a warning on the seat was Compass brand, a division of Learning Curve Brands based in Oak Brook, Ill.
Learning Curve officials say they solicit input from child safety advocates when designing products, which accounts for why they have the warning label on their product.
"We give them a crack at it before we ever launch a product," said John Riedl, the company's vice president of infant gear. "They (safety experts) know that anything in the car that is not anchored can be a projectile, so it's something we naturally thought to include."
Cedarburg mom Monika Seefeld wishes warning labels were pasted to all seats.
Her two booster seats were passed down to her by her brother and sister. She didn't get the instruction manuals.
In May last year Seefeld was in a head-on collision. She had just dropped off her two older kids - both of whom sat in booster seats - and was driving with her 2-year-old son, Tyler.
Upon impact, both booster seats went flying in the passenger compartment. Tyler was struck in the face, and his nose was broken. Scar tissue built up to such a degree that he struggles to breathe through his nose and needs surgery, Seefeld said.
"I wish I would have known about it," Seefeld, 37, said. "Nobody ever told me. I never really heard of it, and after my accident I warned some people that we should be buckling in the empty booster seats and they were like 'I never thought of that.' Virtually 100 percent of the mothers I talked to didn't do that."
George Clark, too, wishes he had known better.
Nearly five months after getting severely battered by a loose booster seat, Clark is awaiting yet another surgery.
Already his medical bills have topped $60,000, and he still needs work on his jaw and teeth. Clark hopes his insurance will cover the costs, but he doesn't know for sure.
"If I had known it could have been a problem, I clearly would have suggested that maybe we want to take the seat out of the car," he said.
Screw the nanny staters. Kids need to see the world from the front seat.
unsecured anythings in the car can cause severe injuries.
“But researchers have found that in a collision, especially a frontal one, unrestrained cargo flies forward with a force exponentially greater than its weight. At 55 mph, a 20-pound parcel exceeds 1,000 pounds of force. A can of peas or the family pet can cause serious injury or even death.”
The science background of this reporter is obviously weak. Exponentially greater than its weight?
Of course flying objects are more dangerous than stationary ones, but it sounds like the reporter jotted down some big words the researchers said then jumbled them together in the story.
Granted, none of those things were legislated requirements to have in a car to transport children, which does bump this up a bit, but seriously - anything at all that’s not locked into place can injure you in a car crash.
“Kids need to see the world from the front seat.”
Just make sure to turn off the passenger side airbag...
What’s the deal with kids and airbags? What about smallish adults? Say a wife in size petite?
“A body at rest tends to remain at rest, or a body in motion tends to remain in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted on by an outside force.”
That’s the first of Newton’s three laws of motion. And I instinctively remember that particular law every time we start out in a car. Anything unsecured in the back seat could hurt one of us if we had to stop suddenly.
Most of the seats we used were hooked on from behind, so they stayed attached, although we did have to check from time to time that the straps hadn't loosened at all.
Now, those child killer airbags ... those I got a problem with!
Why not the front hood? Much better view.
Impact force equals mass times velocity.
I don’t think calculating it is as simple as multiplying pounds times mph, as the author appears to have done.
This formula is the reason relatively low-mass objects, such as bullets, can do massive damage when traveling at high enough speed.
It still is.
The children that grew up and ran insurance companies and carseat manufacturers, that is.
Indeed, and many are far worse than a large relatively light car seat. I'm always taking things out of the back of our vehicles when I load up the kids because of the missile hazard.
m * v is momentum
force is m * a
and the problem is energy dissipations which used to go as 1/2 m*v^2
Right. That reminds me of a CHP officer who told me in about 15 years of work, he never unbuckled a dead person. About a year later he told me that he had to unbuckle a dead person. That individual was killed by an unsecured passenger from the back seat.
Yes, airbags can kill or injure small adults (especially elderly). It’s mostly about height. If they are shorter than 4’10”, disconnect the airbag.
I knew someone who was killed by an unsecured TV in the back of the car flying forward during an accident.
I remember the days where my brother, sister and I fought for the front seat.
Me and my brothers usually sat in my mom’s lap and chewed on a toy painted with lead paint. She would hold us tight with her left hand while she smoked a Camel non-filter with the right hand.
That is, unless it was sunny outside. Then we would ride in the back of the pickup.
With so many things that researchers say can kill us nowadays its a miracle we are still alive.
A whole semester in “drivers education” in public high school.
Not a peep about securing items in the car so they wouldn’t be deadly
missles during a crash/deceleration.
The first time I really took the issue seriously was a couple of
years later when reading an article on the topic in one of the motoring
magazines (IIRC, “Motor Trend”).
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