Connor's Mom
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I hope this is not a double post. If it is Admin feel free to delete.
I just thought I would share an article that I read in an old Reader's Digest. I found it to be very informative. I knew projectiles where bad and a no-no but I guess that I needed to see some statistics and examples to drive it home.
I am copying and pasting the article because you have to register to see the whole think at RD. Taking out the spacing to condense it.
Hidden Dangers in Your Car
Pow Choon Hong, 35, and his wife, Regina, 28, pile their ten-month-old son, Nathan, into their one-year-old black Toyota Wish every weekend for regular family outings to the zoo, the beach or the mall. They're confident it will be a safe trip. After all, Pow's car has the latest safety features and he hasn't missed a single scheduled servicing at the workshop.
But the Singaporean does not consider what's on the back-seat floor or in the cargo area. While everyone is buckled in, they're surrounded by a baby pram, water bottles, a mobile phone and bags of groceries, just to name a few items that might go along for the ride. Pow doesn't give them a thought.
And why would he? Tens of millions of autos on the road today, just like his, have crash tested well and feature air bags and antilock brakes, giving the driver a sense of safety on the road. Yet speed limits have risen and SUVs and MPVs have multiplied. Meanwhile, people have turned their vehicles into second living rooms where hidden dangers abound, from a Blackberry on the dashboard to tennis racquets and golf clubs in the back. It's a recipe for disaster because in a crash, any of these objects
could turn into a deadly projectile.
The automotive industry has known about this for years. In 1986 General Motors engineers in the US were warning that passengers and drivers could sustain serious injuries from unsecured cargo.
To see how dangerous these unsecured items are, we asked vehicle safety testing experts TNO Automotive to simulate a 48kmh head-on crash using an MPV filled with luggage. The results were horrifying.
''In one test, the laptop computer flew forward, striking the driver, who would have been killed by massive skull trauma and brain injury,'' says TNO UK's safety expert David Moseley. ''The baby pram cracked into the head of the front-seat passenger, causing serious, possibly fatal injury.''
One evening in Las Vegas seven years ago, Jacob Tobias buckled his 16-month-old daughter, Kennedy, into her safety seat in their Saturn sedan. They were going home after visiting Tobias's father. Fifteen minutes from their destination, Tobias lost control of the car and spun off the road.
The severe crash killed Tobias. Police found his daughter alive, still strapped in her car seat. But a standard-size metal toolbox on the floor of the back seat had been hurled about in the rollover. It fractured her skull.
Today, Kennedy's right arm and hand are nearly useless. Her legs require braces. ''We never thought about what we stuck in the back of the car,'' says Pamela Tobias, Kennedy's mum.
''Most folks don't think twice about unrestrained cargo,'' says Sean Kane of Strategic Safety, LLC, an American research firm specialising in auto safety. ''Yet in our review of hundreds of crashes each year, it's an unrecognised problem that routinely poses a serious danger.''
Exacerbating the danger is the fact that the fold-down rear seats in MPVs or hatchbacks are typically less resistant to force than the fixed seats of a saloon car. All rear seats are built to withstand up to 45 kilograms – that's equivalent to, say, four full suitcases – shooting forward from the floor of the boot. But when heavy luggage is piled up high against an MPV's seat back, in a crash or heavy braking it may not withstand the load.
When TNO simulated the crash of an MPV with luggage packed high against the rear seat, the seat gave way, crushing the two child-size dummies strapped in the back.
It isn't just inanimate objects that pose a threat. Unrestrained riders can be just as dangerous. Studies in Sweden, Britain and Japan show unbelted rear-seat passengers increase the risk of injury and death to others in the car. ''An unrestrained person in the back becomes a deadly force,'' explains Masao Ichikawa, a researcher at the University of Tokyo.
In another report, a team analysed crashes in the United States between 1988 and 2000. They counted some 61,800 passenger car crashes where two people were riding in the front seat and at least one of them died. They concluded that the risk of death for belted front-seat occupants rose by 20 per cent when someone in the back wasn't wearing a seat belt. Looking
at it another way: Whereas you double your chances of survival by buckling up, you increase them 120 per cent by having your passengers buckle up, too.
Research carried out for Reader's Digest in the US backs up these findings. Our study looked at 36,000 frontal collisions in which the driver wore a seat belt and a passenger directly behind him did not and 244,000 frontal crashes with a belted passenger behind a belted driver.
Of drivers with unbelted back-seat passengers, one in 68 was killed compared with only one in 330 drivers with a restrained back-seat passenger. ''These figures show that if the person behind you un-clicks their belt, you're four times more likely to die in a frontal crash,'' explains Britain's top crash safety expert Murray Mackay, professor emeritus of transport safety at the University of Birmingham.
According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2001 over 36,000 drivers and passengers lost their lives; another 2.9 million were injured. Experts say that many injuries and deaths aren't the result of the collision, but of unrestrained cargo, pets or passengers.
The accident figures in Asia are no less sobering. According to the Royal Malaysian Police, in 2006 some 1215 drivers and passengers lost their lives; another 1589 were seriously injured. Across the border in Singapore, there were 190 fatalities from 7499 road traffic accidents last year. Some 10,000 people were injured.
Jerry Donaldson, senior research director at Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, in Washington, DC, says loose cargo and unbelted riders are safety issues that drivers overlook. ''We're losing more lives and suffering more injuries than we realise.''
One study in the US, by State Farm Insurance and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, looked at nearly 180,000 cases where children were in a car crash. Close to 3500 of them were hit by objects, other passengers or both.
Did those collisions result in serious injury? Not necessarily, says Derek Fee, of State Farm's Canadian office. ''But that's still a significant number,'' he says. ''And it shows that objects create additional risk.''
''Effectiveness and use of children's car seats surpasses adult seat belts,'' says Charles Hurley of the National Safety Council in the US. ''The odds of being less protected in the first place put adults at even greater risk. And the list of stuff they carry around in their cars is endless.''
''Anything has the potential to cause injury or death,'' notes Joanne Banfield, manager of trauma injury prevention at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. She mentions the son of a colleague who was rear-ended. A credit card that was on the dashboard
struck the young man and cut his neck open. Fortunately, that injury was minor. But in a crash, any object with an edge can become a blade. Blunt objects can become sledgehammers.
Extreme Force. Farm worker Mota Singh, 44, was being driven to work near Chiddingfold, Surrey, when the driver of the van he was travelling in lost control and veered into a bridge. Singh died from a fractured skull – caused by a trolley jack. ''Tragically, they hadn't given a thought to securing the jack,'' says
Sergeant Phyllica McLeod of the Surrey Police Strategic Traffic Unit. ''When the van stopped on impact, the jack kept moving, turning into a killer weapon.''
The list of projectiles goes on: golf clubs, umbrellas, strollers, even pets. ''In a head-on crash where you're going 55 kmh, a 450-gram can of beans in the back seat continues at that speed until it strikes someone or something with 45 kilograms of force. That's more than enough to fracture your skull,'' says Robert Stearns, an accident re-constructionist based in the US.
The rising popularity of SUVs, MPVs and minivans – all lacking standard cargo boots – may be part of the problem. For millions of drivers, everything goes into one open compartment – a one-box design.
In July 1996, a mother in Texas, loaded her 1994 Dodge minivan with her two young children in the second seat. On the floor in the back were nearly 140 kilograms of boxed books. When the mother lost control of the vehicle, the minivan dove nose-first into a dry creek bed. The books rocketed into the steel legs of the second-row seat with massive force, obliterating the seat legs. One child was flung headfirst into the rear of the front seat, killing her.
''People are largely unaware of what can happen in collisions,'' says Allan Williams, chief scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. ''The forces are extreme. After the collision outside, there are always collisions inside. Both can wreak havoc.''
Buckled Up? It was nearly 9pm when three friends in their seventies were driving home through the suburbs of London. The two passengers were sisters – and the one in the back was not wearing her seat belt.
Without warning, an oncoming car smashed into them. As though shot from a cannon, the rear-seat passenger blasted into her own sister's body, throwing her forward against the seat belt, crushing her windpipe.
''Death wouldn't have happened had she been buckled up,'' says the traffic officer who attended the collision. ''No other accident has stuck in my mind like this one because of the terrible tragedy of one sister killing the other.''
A passenger hit by another occupant can suffer severe head trauma, a broken neck or spine. If the front rider is pushed harder into his seat belt, he could end up with deep bruising of his internal organs. A rear passenger could ramp into the back of the front seat, collapsing it and crushing or asphyxiating someone in front.
''A front-seat passenger becomes a crude air bag for a person in the back,'' says Charles Hurley of the National Safety Council.
Good Advice. In the spring of 2001, 33-year-old Erin McCarthy attended a police-sponsored car-seat check to make sure her 16-month-old son, Jack, would be properly secured in her SUV.
After adjusting the seat, San Diego Police Officer Mark McCullough noted the array of baby gear in the car's cargo area and urged McCarthy to purchase a cargo divider – a cage that separates the passenger and cargo areas. McCullough explained that objects in the back might fly forward in a crash and injure Jack, and that police were seeing more such injuries. McCarthy did not wait; she bought a divider – and in the nick of time.
On the evening of June 10, mother and son were driving home when a pickup truck raced across three lanes, clipping the back of McCarthy's SUV.
Spun across the expressway, the Explorer hit the center concrete divider. McCarthy feared looking into the back seat to see if Jack was okay, but when she did, a wave of relief washed over her. The infant wasn't even bruised.
Meanwhile, Jack's stroller, a booster seat, a first-aid kit, cans of food and auto supplies – all in the cargo area – remained in place. ''There's no doubt that the divider saved my son's life,'' McCarthy says. ''Before I went to that car-seat check, I'd never read a single thing about the dangers of projectiles,'' she added. ''And I read everything about safety I can get my hands on. Why is it that no-one talks about this?''
I just thought I would share an article that I read in an old Reader's Digest. I found it to be very informative. I knew projectiles where bad and a no-no but I guess that I needed to see some statistics and examples to drive it home.
I am copying and pasting the article because you have to register to see the whole think at RD. Taking out the spacing to condense it.
Hidden Dangers in Your Car
Pow Choon Hong, 35, and his wife, Regina, 28, pile their ten-month-old son, Nathan, into their one-year-old black Toyota Wish every weekend for regular family outings to the zoo, the beach or the mall. They're confident it will be a safe trip. After all, Pow's car has the latest safety features and he hasn't missed a single scheduled servicing at the workshop.
But the Singaporean does not consider what's on the back-seat floor or in the cargo area. While everyone is buckled in, they're surrounded by a baby pram, water bottles, a mobile phone and bags of groceries, just to name a few items that might go along for the ride. Pow doesn't give them a thought.
And why would he? Tens of millions of autos on the road today, just like his, have crash tested well and feature air bags and antilock brakes, giving the driver a sense of safety on the road. Yet speed limits have risen and SUVs and MPVs have multiplied. Meanwhile, people have turned their vehicles into second living rooms where hidden dangers abound, from a Blackberry on the dashboard to tennis racquets and golf clubs in the back. It's a recipe for disaster because in a crash, any of these objects
could turn into a deadly projectile.
The automotive industry has known about this for years. In 1986 General Motors engineers in the US were warning that passengers and drivers could sustain serious injuries from unsecured cargo.
To see how dangerous these unsecured items are, we asked vehicle safety testing experts TNO Automotive to simulate a 48kmh head-on crash using an MPV filled with luggage. The results were horrifying.
''In one test, the laptop computer flew forward, striking the driver, who would have been killed by massive skull trauma and brain injury,'' says TNO UK's safety expert David Moseley. ''The baby pram cracked into the head of the front-seat passenger, causing serious, possibly fatal injury.''
One evening in Las Vegas seven years ago, Jacob Tobias buckled his 16-month-old daughter, Kennedy, into her safety seat in their Saturn sedan. They were going home after visiting Tobias's father. Fifteen minutes from their destination, Tobias lost control of the car and spun off the road.
The severe crash killed Tobias. Police found his daughter alive, still strapped in her car seat. But a standard-size metal toolbox on the floor of the back seat had been hurled about in the rollover. It fractured her skull.
Today, Kennedy's right arm and hand are nearly useless. Her legs require braces. ''We never thought about what we stuck in the back of the car,'' says Pamela Tobias, Kennedy's mum.
''Most folks don't think twice about unrestrained cargo,'' says Sean Kane of Strategic Safety, LLC, an American research firm specialising in auto safety. ''Yet in our review of hundreds of crashes each year, it's an unrecognised problem that routinely poses a serious danger.''
Exacerbating the danger is the fact that the fold-down rear seats in MPVs or hatchbacks are typically less resistant to force than the fixed seats of a saloon car. All rear seats are built to withstand up to 45 kilograms – that's equivalent to, say, four full suitcases – shooting forward from the floor of the boot. But when heavy luggage is piled up high against an MPV's seat back, in a crash or heavy braking it may not withstand the load.
When TNO simulated the crash of an MPV with luggage packed high against the rear seat, the seat gave way, crushing the two child-size dummies strapped in the back.
It isn't just inanimate objects that pose a threat. Unrestrained riders can be just as dangerous. Studies in Sweden, Britain and Japan show unbelted rear-seat passengers increase the risk of injury and death to others in the car. ''An unrestrained person in the back becomes a deadly force,'' explains Masao Ichikawa, a researcher at the University of Tokyo.
In another report, a team analysed crashes in the United States between 1988 and 2000. They counted some 61,800 passenger car crashes where two people were riding in the front seat and at least one of them died. They concluded that the risk of death for belted front-seat occupants rose by 20 per cent when someone in the back wasn't wearing a seat belt. Looking
at it another way: Whereas you double your chances of survival by buckling up, you increase them 120 per cent by having your passengers buckle up, too.
Research carried out for Reader's Digest in the US backs up these findings. Our study looked at 36,000 frontal collisions in which the driver wore a seat belt and a passenger directly behind him did not and 244,000 frontal crashes with a belted passenger behind a belted driver.
Of drivers with unbelted back-seat passengers, one in 68 was killed compared with only one in 330 drivers with a restrained back-seat passenger. ''These figures show that if the person behind you un-clicks their belt, you're four times more likely to die in a frontal crash,'' explains Britain's top crash safety expert Murray Mackay, professor emeritus of transport safety at the University of Birmingham.
According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2001 over 36,000 drivers and passengers lost their lives; another 2.9 million were injured. Experts say that many injuries and deaths aren't the result of the collision, but of unrestrained cargo, pets or passengers.
The accident figures in Asia are no less sobering. According to the Royal Malaysian Police, in 2006 some 1215 drivers and passengers lost their lives; another 1589 were seriously injured. Across the border in Singapore, there were 190 fatalities from 7499 road traffic accidents last year. Some 10,000 people were injured.
Jerry Donaldson, senior research director at Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, in Washington, DC, says loose cargo and unbelted riders are safety issues that drivers overlook. ''We're losing more lives and suffering more injuries than we realise.''
One study in the US, by State Farm Insurance and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, looked at nearly 180,000 cases where children were in a car crash. Close to 3500 of them were hit by objects, other passengers or both.
Did those collisions result in serious injury? Not necessarily, says Derek Fee, of State Farm's Canadian office. ''But that's still a significant number,'' he says. ''And it shows that objects create additional risk.''
''Effectiveness and use of children's car seats surpasses adult seat belts,'' says Charles Hurley of the National Safety Council in the US. ''The odds of being less protected in the first place put adults at even greater risk. And the list of stuff they carry around in their cars is endless.''
''Anything has the potential to cause injury or death,'' notes Joanne Banfield, manager of trauma injury prevention at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. She mentions the son of a colleague who was rear-ended. A credit card that was on the dashboard
struck the young man and cut his neck open. Fortunately, that injury was minor. But in a crash, any object with an edge can become a blade. Blunt objects can become sledgehammers.
Extreme Force. Farm worker Mota Singh, 44, was being driven to work near Chiddingfold, Surrey, when the driver of the van he was travelling in lost control and veered into a bridge. Singh died from a fractured skull – caused by a trolley jack. ''Tragically, they hadn't given a thought to securing the jack,'' says
Sergeant Phyllica McLeod of the Surrey Police Strategic Traffic Unit. ''When the van stopped on impact, the jack kept moving, turning into a killer weapon.''
The list of projectiles goes on: golf clubs, umbrellas, strollers, even pets. ''In a head-on crash where you're going 55 kmh, a 450-gram can of beans in the back seat continues at that speed until it strikes someone or something with 45 kilograms of force. That's more than enough to fracture your skull,'' says Robert Stearns, an accident re-constructionist based in the US.
The rising popularity of SUVs, MPVs and minivans – all lacking standard cargo boots – may be part of the problem. For millions of drivers, everything goes into one open compartment – a one-box design.
In July 1996, a mother in Texas, loaded her 1994 Dodge minivan with her two young children in the second seat. On the floor in the back were nearly 140 kilograms of boxed books. When the mother lost control of the vehicle, the minivan dove nose-first into a dry creek bed. The books rocketed into the steel legs of the second-row seat with massive force, obliterating the seat legs. One child was flung headfirst into the rear of the front seat, killing her.
''People are largely unaware of what can happen in collisions,'' says Allan Williams, chief scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. ''The forces are extreme. After the collision outside, there are always collisions inside. Both can wreak havoc.''
Buckled Up? It was nearly 9pm when three friends in their seventies were driving home through the suburbs of London. The two passengers were sisters – and the one in the back was not wearing her seat belt.
Without warning, an oncoming car smashed into them. As though shot from a cannon, the rear-seat passenger blasted into her own sister's body, throwing her forward against the seat belt, crushing her windpipe.
''Death wouldn't have happened had she been buckled up,'' says the traffic officer who attended the collision. ''No other accident has stuck in my mind like this one because of the terrible tragedy of one sister killing the other.''
A passenger hit by another occupant can suffer severe head trauma, a broken neck or spine. If the front rider is pushed harder into his seat belt, he could end up with deep bruising of his internal organs. A rear passenger could ramp into the back of the front seat, collapsing it and crushing or asphyxiating someone in front.
''A front-seat passenger becomes a crude air bag for a person in the back,'' says Charles Hurley of the National Safety Council.
Good Advice. In the spring of 2001, 33-year-old Erin McCarthy attended a police-sponsored car-seat check to make sure her 16-month-old son, Jack, would be properly secured in her SUV.
After adjusting the seat, San Diego Police Officer Mark McCullough noted the array of baby gear in the car's cargo area and urged McCarthy to purchase a cargo divider – a cage that separates the passenger and cargo areas. McCullough explained that objects in the back might fly forward in a crash and injure Jack, and that police were seeing more such injuries. McCarthy did not wait; she bought a divider – and in the nick of time.
On the evening of June 10, mother and son were driving home when a pickup truck raced across three lanes, clipping the back of McCarthy's SUV.
Spun across the expressway, the Explorer hit the center concrete divider. McCarthy feared looking into the back seat to see if Jack was okay, but when she did, a wave of relief washed over her. The infant wasn't even bruised.
Meanwhile, Jack's stroller, a booster seat, a first-aid kit, cans of food and auto supplies – all in the cargo area – remained in place. ''There's no doubt that the divider saved my son's life,'' McCarthy says. ''Before I went to that car-seat check, I'd never read a single thing about the dangers of projectiles,'' she added. ''And I read everything about safety I can get my hands on. Why is it that no-one talks about this?''
