Who Needs a Seat Belt



Who Needs a Seat Belt?

If you drive, sooner or later you’ll find out

By Robert Gannon

On Patrol north of Baltimore one afternoon in March 1968, Maryland state trooper john Burton notices a toddler standing on the front seat of a moving car. That was a violation of Maryland’s child-restraint law, so Burton pulled the driver over. “You know kids, officer," said 25-year-old Roger Moore. “They get restless.” Burton wrote him a citation anyway.

Grumbling, Moore buckled his son in, tossed the ticket into his glove compartment and went on his way. Moore’s attitude isn’t unusual. Even in the 30 states and the District of Columbia where seat-belt use is mandatory, only half the motorists obey. In other states, seven out of ten go belt less. Some complain that seat belts are uncomfortable. Others fear being trapped during a crash. Still others simply don’t want the rule makers telling them what to do.

The average motorist is virtually certain to have at least one injury causing accident in his lifetime. Without a belt, he will be twice as likely to be killed or seriously injured. So why the resistance?

“Because these people don’t understand the forces that re involved in an automobile accident.” says Diane Steed, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For years, scientists in NHTSA”A Accident Investigation Division have analyzed films of test crasher involving dummies. Watching some of the films, I saw what my accident may be like if I’m not wearing a seat belt.

The First Half-Second. Suppose I’m going 40 miles per hour, and my car hits a fixed object. Immediately on impact, my body is hurtling toward the dashboard at almost 60 feet per second. I can’t stop myself with my hands – that would be like bench-pressing at least 3500 pounds. Inevitable, my stomach rams the steering wheel.

Meanwhile, my legs instinctively stiffen and crack at the knees. My right knee wedges under the dash. AS the firewall buckles upward, the leg snaps just above the ankle. My upper legs, jammed in the dash, resist the forward motion of my torso, dislocating my hip joints instantly.

My upper body is jackknifing forward. Less than a tenth of a second in the crash, it slams into the steering column. My breastbone caves in just before my ribs start to break. Little room remains in my chest for lungs, heart and aorta, while the broken bones have become spears.

Now my head is smashing into the windshield, rushing my nose and cheekbones. It strikes at the some speed I would attain by driving on the sidewalk from a second-story window. My brain simultaneously slams into my forehead and rips away from the back of my skull. Then it rebounds, crashing and ripping again.

Serious accidents happen more than 600 times every day across the United States. If everyone used seat belts, Steed, says, over 19,000 lives a year would be saved and half of those who would have been seriously injured would escape with only cuts and bruises.

Flimsy Excuses, Vince Caplins supervises the 911 emergency exchange in Anne Arundel County, south of Baltimore. “Even the little accidents get to you after a while’” he says of his nine years as a paramedic. “The car will be hardly dented, yet you’ll have someone with his teeth knocked out or his nose broken on his lip hanging by a thread – all because he didn’t bother to buckle up.”

Jim Rostek works for one of 13 paramedic units in the county. Ride with him awhile and you’ll forever remember the 30-year-old stevedore with a t ruptured spleen, broken legs, cracked ribs and a concussion, who kept saying, “Don’t hurt my arm!” when the arm wasn’t even scratched. You’ll remember the middle-aged secretary found wandering confused after a ten-mile-an-hour fender-bender; she looked fine until you noticed the half-inch depression in her forehead from the radio knob.

You will remember the sounds, the little wounded-animal mewing that led you to the woman nobody noticed thrown under a bush. You’ll remember the groaning rasp of a person’s last breath. And you’ll remember seeing, time after time, a seat belt neatly stowed.

The paramedics talk about excuses people use for not buckling up. “They say they’d rather be thrown from the cat than be trapped in it.” One veteran told me. “They’ll be thrown out, all right. But the car is flipping over in the same direction and it’ll roll right over them. I’ve seen too many crushed heads and severed arms to buy that one.’ Studies show that in an accident where seat belts are not used, the front seat passenger is 2 ½ times more likely to be killed, and the driver is four times more likely to die than a person who is buckled in.

“I’ve seen about 2400 accidents," Rostek says. “And I can’t remember ever unbuckling a corpse.”

Shattered Lives. “If you could see what we see every night, you’d be as religious about wearing your seat belt as we are,” asserts Dr. R. Adams Cowley, director of the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore.

One night when I was there, Jill Avery was brought in. Drifting into consciousness, Avery would whisper through cut and mashed lips, “What happened?” But the pain of multiple bone fractures kept her from hearing the answer.

Jill’s husband of 16 days, Richie, had let the car wander across the center line. The car sideswiped another car, then swerved and slammed into a gully. Richie, his seat belt fastened, received only a mild concussion from striking his head on the side window. Jill, who had been unbelted, was now about to undergo surgery on a shattered thighbone. She also had severe head trauma, an upper-arm fracture, and bruises all over her face. She would be in the hospital for weeks and unable to work for months.

Phillip Militello, the center’s director of surgery, tells of patients who preferred not to wear seat belts: the student who arrived with a rear-view mirror embedded three inches into his brain. (He lived, but lost sight in one eye.) The man who was brought in with his brain exposed – he had flown through the windshield and struck a phone pole, hitting a metal step that ripped off the top of his skull. (He lived, too, but three years later he does little more than sit in a chair, look out his window, and rock.) The beautiful young woman who caught the gearshift with the corner of her mouth; it ripped upward to just underneath her eye. (Plastic surgery has helped a great deal.)

Even tough hospital veterans shudder when they talk about unbelted mothers with young children on their laps, and how often the parent survives because the child is crushed.

Everyone Pays. Montebello Rehabilitation Hospital in Baltimore, the state’s main rehabilitation center, usually has about 20 car-accident victims in its two trauma sections. I asked if any of those had been wearing seat belts. “Some were,” said 36-year-old Gail Ulrich, Who had spent more than a year on the mend there. “But they usually say that without the belt they’d be dead.”

Ulrich was one of the lucky ones. Other victims will never be the same again.

You see them as you walk from room to room. The mother saying to her son, curled up like a fetus, “If you can hear me, squeeze my hand”; the newly blind hairdresser; the paralyzed phone repairman; the musician who will never speak; the basketball coach who only stares.

Some drivers insist that it’s their own business if they choose not to wear a seat belt. They’re wrong. Of the 35,000 severe brain injuries caused by auto accidents each year, most could have been prevented by seat belts. Lifetime care for a severely brain-damaged patient costs an average of $4 million. It is now estimated that deaths and injuries that could have been prevented by proper seat-belt usage cost society as much as $6 billion a year. Most of that is borne by the public, in either insurance premiums or taxes.

After ticketing Roger Moore for leaving his child unbuckled, trooper John Burton thought no more about the incident. Then a week later, a fellow officer pulled the ticket from his own pocket. He had found it in the glove compartment of a car wrecked in Bel Air, Md., just 19 minutes after Burton had issued it. The boy, strapped into his seat, received only minor injuries.

He will never see his father again, however. While Moore had taken the time to fasten his son’s seat belt, he had failed to buckle his own.

How Long Will They Wait?

Despite the overwhelming evidence that mandatory seat-belt laws save lives, 17 states still do not have such laws in effect. They are:

|Alabama |Kentucky |New Hampshire |Vermont |

|Arizona |Maine |North Dakota |Wyoming |

|Arkansas |Massachusetts |Rhode Island | |

|Alaska |Mississippi |South Carolina | |

|Delaware |Nebraska |South Dakota | |

Some states listed above currently have seat-belt legislation pending. West Virginia, Georgia, and Oregon’s mandatory laws go into effect July 1, 1988, September 1, 1988 and January 1, 1989 respectively.

Reader Digest, May, 1988

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download