Safety Device Poses Big Risks to Small Riders

By Michael Clements

USA TODAY


Air bags- the most heralded safety device since the seat belt- have been blamed for killing five children this year, setting off alarms at the highest levels of federal safety agencies.

But the rash of air-bag accidents shouldn't come as a surprise. Automotive engineers have warned for more than two decades that air bags could pose a fatal threat to children and small adults. "We anticipated (the risk to children) years ago, and we also anticipated there might be injuries to adults who are too close to the bags," says Howard Wilson of the Society of Automotive Engineers.

In 1979, General Motors warned safety officials that children not using a safety seat properly or not wearing a seat belt when an air bag deploys "might be exposed to inflation forces capable of producing significant injuries."

Government regulators, distrustful of the industry, dismissed GM's warning as a ruse to delay air-bag requirements. "You have to remember what the environment was like 10 or 15 years ago," says Ricardo Martinez, the current head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "The agency had to force manufacturers to allocate resources to safety."

But Martinez concedes concerns raised by GM 16 years ago "have borne some fruit." Five children have been killed and another seriously injured since March by passenger-side air bags in low-speed crashes. At least two children were killed in 1993-94.


GM's studies were based on crash tests using dummies, human cadavers and anesthetized pigs. (GM no longer uses animals in crash tests.)

"As early as 1969, GM's public (articles) talk about air bags as a potential safety benefit but also recognize that they have inherent injury risks because they carry so much energy," says Robert Lange, a GM director of engineering.

Air bags are not the gentlelooking pillows that billow in slow-motion on television commercials.


They explode at speeds of about 130mph to nearly 200 mph -- less than a blink of an eye. They can exert 1,100 to 2,600 pounds of pressure on the chest of a crash dummy. Passenger-side air bags now are in more than 12 million vehicles and are being built into almost every '96 model car, most minivans and many sport utilities.

Air bags represent a major breakthrough in safety, most experts agree. NHTSA estimates they have saved more than 900 lives since the late-80's. "Air bags dramatically improve outcomes in accidents," says Dr. Jeffrey Augenstein, a Miami trauma surgeon who studies auto accidents under grants funded by NHTSA. But he says there "has to refinement of the (seat) belting and air-bag systems."

NHTSA and the auto industry agree. The chief traffic safety agency has opened a review that likely will change the way air bags are designed and tested. "We cannot allow cars to have air bags that can kill a child," Martinez says.

Safety experts outside government are proposing solutions ranging from various ways of decreasing the force of air-bag deployments to giving car owner the right to disconnect their passenger-side air bags. A Senate committee is planning hearings on air bags later this year. It's too soon to know what NHTSA will do.

For now, the advice from government officials and safety experts is stunningly low-tech: Put kids in the back seat. But the lack of more sophisticated remedies frustrates many child-safety advocates.


"We Need To Do Something Very Fast


...not only to educated people about the problem but to give them something better to do than put their children in the back seat," says Kathleen Weber, a child-passenger protection expert at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Vehicles with passenger-side air bags carry warnings in owners' manuals and on visors against placing a rear-facing infant seat in front. Child safety seats also carry warnings.

But after several of the accidents, parents told safety investigators they never saw the warnings. "One could have predicted that there would have been negative consequences for infants because adults are not 100% reliable in following instructions," says Stephanie Tombrello, head of Safety7 Belt-Safe USA, a private non-profit group. "You just can't count on it."

Accurate Information Isn't Always Available.


In one of the infant deaths, a hospital was using and outdated videotape on child safety. The video, titled "Getting it Right," was produced in 1990 before dual air bags were common. It advised parents to place a baby in the front seat, the wrong advice for an air-bag car.

The father viewed the tape more than once, and the parents followed the video's advice. The 20-day-old infant was killed last summer when the air bag deployed in a 23-mph crash.

"I am confident it is happening at other locations," says Dr. Marilyn Bull, a pediatrics professor at Indiana University School of Medicine. "Less up-to-date videos haven't been replaced."

In the fatal accidents involving children, air bags went off in low-speeds crashes, as they are designed to do. Some of the crashes were less than 15mph. The National Transportation Safety Board said in a report earlier this month that "in each of the accidents the child would have survived with no or minor injuries had the air bag not deployed."

Three of the deaths and one serious injury involved skull fractures and other head injuries to infants in rear-facing safety seats placed in the front seat. Investigators say the injuries were caused by the air-bag cover flying open and slamming into the safety seat near the child's head, transferring the force through the hard plastic safety seat.

The others killed were five years to nine-years-old and riding in the front seat. Three were not wearing seat belts. The other was wearing a lap belt, but it's not clear whether he was using the shoulder strap or whether is was wrongly placed behind his back. Injuries were to the head, neck or spine.

Minor air bag injuries to adults are fairly common, typically facial abrasions or eye irritations. But serious injuries also have occurred. In 1993, a 45-year-old Florida woman died from a broken neck caused when the air bag on her Mazda Miata deployed in a low-speed accident. She was wearing a lap-and-shoulder belt, but her small size-5 feet, 2 inches tall- caused her to sit too close to the steering wheel.


NHTSA is asking the public for recommendations before the end of the year for ways to prevent air-bag injuries.

The reason air-bags deploy with so much force is that they must protect an adult who is not wearing a seat belt. Current tests must be at 30 mph using an unbelted dummy the size of an adult male. But that standard was set in the early '80s when seat belt usage was less than 15%. Now it's closer to two-thirds. Using a belted dummy would allow a slower inflation speed.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety initiated a proposal that Ford Motor submitted to NHTSA to lower the test speed for dummies to 25 mph while raising the speed for belted dummies to 35 mph.

Others suggest adding cut-off switches for passengers air bags on future models. Automakers already are allowed to put the switches on vehicles with no back seats, such as some pick-ups and sports cars.

But Joan Claybrook, a former head of NHTSA, calls that idea "the worst of all possible" solutions. "People will forget it's turned off," she says.

Still, Michigan's Weber says dramatic solutions are needed or the problem of air-bag injuries to children will get worse. She suggests:

  • A moratorium on passenger air bags. Currently, cars built after Sept. 1, 1997, must have dual air bags, but most new cars have them now.
  • Allowing car owners to have dealers disconnect passenger air bags. Others with special needs, such as disabled occupants, also should be allowed to disconnect air bags.

But technical problems could make it impossible to disconnect only one air bag. And such an action could create massive liability problems for the industry.

Brian O'Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, says the longer-term solution is the "smart" air bag that will be able to sense child seats or unbelted passengers. But they are still several years away.

"I feel very strongly that children ought to be restrained," he says. "But the penalty for parents being ignorant or neglectful should not be serious injury or a death.
Contributing: Jayne O'Donnell


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