Annual Safety Checkup
What You Don't Know Can Hurt You
by B.J. Killeen

The most worrisome day in a person’s life is the day you bring your newborn baby home from the hospital. From then on, you never stop worrying about that child’s safety. Whether it’s electrical outlets or cleaning supplies or everyday accidents, you do your best to keep the evils of the world away. Unfortunately, when you get into a vehicle, outside forces may conspire to do your family harm. We want to update you on what’s happening with child and occupant safety in today’s highly technical and greatly improved vehicles.

Although the word has gone out for more than two years about children and airbags, there are still deaths being attributed to children in safety seats placed in front. Thankfully, many state agencies are conducting “car seat checkups,” which stop vehicles at prescribed checkpoints and verify that a child’s seat is correctly mounted, children are in the back, and parents are buckled up. One of these checkpoints actually saved the life of Tezra Haire’s son, Zuriel, when a member of the checkup team insisted she move her eight-month-old son to the back seat. Two hours later, they were in an airbag-deploying crash, which would have been deadly if her son had been in the front seat, where she had originally placed him.

General Motors, in partnership with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the National Safety Council, the American Medical Association, and corporations such as Sears, Blockbuster Video, Nationwide Insurance, and others, have been distributing a booklet called Precious Cargo: Protecting the Children That Ride With You. The booklet includes answers to questions about how child seats work, when to use them, how airbags work, how seatbelts work, and how to use them properly. More than two million books were distributed in 1998, and versions were printed in English, Spanish, and French.

According to statistics, one out of five child safety seats is used incorrectly, and 40 percent of children aren’t restrained at all. Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of child deaths in America. Each year, more than 1,800 children ages 14 and under die in automobile crashes, and more than 280,000 are injured. The goal of these information programs is to reduce these numbers drastically.

All three domestic manufacturers, General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler, are involved in some type of buckle-up campaign designed to increase awareness of child safety as well as general awareness of safety features found in their respective vehicles.

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