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.
OK, I don’t get it.
Acceleration is the rate at which something is increasing it’s velocity. Right? Why is this relevant to the force generated when a mass moving at a particular velocity stops suddenly?
I suspect we’re saying the same thing. That the acceleration in question is actually the deceleration created when the mass stops moving.
Yes. F=1/2MV^2
Mr. Clark should sue the children! :-) How are you?
The force is one half the mass times the square of the velocity, so doubling the speed quadruples the force of the impact.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense.
I still remember riding a bus to Montréal on the 401 when we passed a car that had a shelf behind the back seat. There was a kid lying across it sleeping :-O
You indeed answered your own question. Deceleration is simply negative acceleration; the force is the same but in the opposite direction.
Deceleration is called negative acceleration in physics. What determines the force exerted by an object when it stops is its mass times the acceleration. The acceleration is determined by the changed in velocity divided by the time of the collision. That time is usually very small, so the acceleration is huge. Therefore the force exerted by the child seat is pretty big.
Your Mom and ours must have been good pals.
We'd practice with our Daisy BB rifles from the front seat, and hand Mom canned Daquiris from the cooler (a huge Coleman aluminum jobbie kept conveniently right behind the passenger seat) and light her Pall Malls. The back seat was mostly for our empty KFC boxes.
No, that is kinetic energy, not force. See post #28. The change in speed divided by the time of collision determines the force exerted by a mass.
No, that is momentum. Momentum is not force. Again, see post #28. The key thing is change in speed divided by time.
So you don't have airbags, right?
They don't print that on anvils either, but most would agree it's obvious.
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.
I feel for this guy, I really do. He's been in a terrible accident which unfortunately was exacerbated by his and his friends lack of common sense and attention. Problem is, behind him is standing some ambulance-chasing lawyer fishing for a lawsuit.
I think to demonstrate the dangers of having something with more mass than the box of tissues, they may have stuck a bowling ball in the back for the finale.
I prefer the unsecured dual speakers with 5 pound magnets and plenty of sharp edges. If you don't have those, several concrete blocks with machetes attached will do.
“Why not the front hood? Much better view.”
Dude, you know that isn’t done until High School.
Nor a spouse apparently.
Actually, if you poll enough of a sample, you will find people who lost siblings who were riding in the back of a pickup.
In high school I made a comment about being in the back of the pickup and standing. A classmate said that was what his sister was doing before she died.
My bad- I said force but should've said energy.
I think they used the rubber from an inner tube to support the cone.
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