Posted on 11/18/2002 9:12:11 AM PST by Gun142
Grandma 'destroyed' by child's death 11/18/02Stephen Hudak
Eaton Township- The few times she rode in the front seat, 5-year-old Adrianna Cortimilia felt like a big girl, her father said. The last time, it killed her. Adrianna, a kindergarten student at Grafton Primary School, died Friday from head injuries apparently caused by an air bag that inflated during an accident a day earlier in a parking lot in Lorain. A city spokesman said an accident report was not available yesterday. Adrianna and her 3-year-old brother, Wesley, were in a van driven by their maternal grandmother, Betty Stull, when it crashed into a concrete barrier at Oakwood Plaza on Pearl Avenue. Wesley, who was strapped into a child seat behind the driver, was not injured. Adrianna and Wesley lived in Eaton Township with Stull, her former husband, Ricky Tenoschok, and the children's mother, Sheri Cortimilia, 21, who was separated from their father, Jeremy Cortimilia of Wooster. Most of the time, Adrianna rode in the van's back seat, Tenoschok said. "I honestly can't say why" she was in the front seat, Ten oschok said yesterday. "Probably Ana wanted to and her grandmother let her because they weren't going to go that far." Stull was taking them to a secondhand store in Oakwood Plaza to look at a used refrigerator. Tenoschok said Adrianna unlatched her seat belt just before the low-speed crash. "She could do it. She knew how," he said. Tenoschok said Stull realizes she could be charged with child endangering because the law requires children to be buckled. But she did not know the van had a passenger-side air bag, he said. "She's destroyed," Tenoschok said. "It'll prey on her mind the rest of her life." Although air bags are credited with saving 2,600 motorists since 1997, they pose special hazards to children, according to the Internet site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. An air bag inflates in milliseconds, reaching a speed of 160 mph. Because shoulder and lap belts often fail to properly restrain children, even a child wearing a safety belt can be thrown forward into an inflating air bag as it is reaching top speed. Safety campaigns have helped, but many parents still do not realize the potential danger air bags pose to children, said Dr. Flaura Koplin Winston, a national expert on the issue. While Jeremy Cortimilia's parents, Michael and Suzanne Cortimilia, helped select pictures for a photo collage of Adrianna to display at the funeral home, the grieving father remembered his daughter. She loved music, dancing and sitting in the front seat, he said.
Plain Dealer reporter Christopher Jensen contributed to this story.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
shudak@plaind.com, 1-800-683-7348
Plain Dealer Reporter
Somebody needs to have their license revoked before they kill someone else through their negligence.
Of course, that was before the modern "life-savers" ............
Becki
The Issue
Should the auto industry be required to install unproven new air bags in 2004 models?
Having failed to learn their lesson about mandating safety standards ahead of feasible technology, federal regulators are stubbornly pushing ahead with requirements that automakers outfit their fleets with so-called smart air bags starting with the 2004 model year.
That gives the industry less than one year to perfect a technology that almost everyone agrees isn't ready yet. If the new technology can't be engineered in time, the air bags that will go into many vehicles next year will be a step down in safety from the current systems and could lead to more injuries and deaths.
That's not how federal automobile safety regulations should work. But, unfortunately, that's been the history of air bags.
The new rules were put in place to reduce the deadly risk to children and smaller adults posed by the original air bag systems. On those systems, air bags were required to deploy with a force strong enough to protect a full-size adult who was not wearing a seat belt.
Automakers warned that full-force air bags were dangerous and could lead to fatalities. But the federal regulators wouldn't listen, and the dire predictions came true. At least 214 people, including 133 children, have been killed by air bags since 1990.
The death rate has declined sharply during the past two years as automakers began equipping vehicles with the less explosive air bags they originally recommended. In addition, education campaigns to move young children to the back seat, and on-off switches on the passenger side of trucks have helped reduce fatalities.
The result is that air bags are nearly 100 percent reliable in providing protection without killing those they are intended to protect.
Still, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will not back off demands that automakers phase in a new generation of smart air bags, which are designed to sense, among other things, the weight of a passenger and adjust the deployment force accordingly. The upgrade will cost automakers roughly $2 billion, or about $125 per vehicle.
Once again, the agency is ignoring warnings from manufacturers that the new air bag systems aren't entirely safe. In doing so, NHTSA is inexplicably repeating its past mistakes.
USA TODAY reports that the new air bag systems headed for the 2004 models have performed poorly in tests. The air bags too often mistake small children for full-size adults and vice-versa. They also can be affected by water on the seat or high humidity.
In short, the systems aren't fool-proof and could be as dangerous as the original air bags.
NHTSA should back off the smart air bag mandate and allow automakers time to design air bag systems that actually work.
Automakers have plenty of incentive to do so, since they will bear the liability for injuries and deaths caused by air bags. Forcing them to equip their vehicles with unreliable air bags exposes them to unnecessary litigation and their customers to unnecessary risk.
Considering that it was NHTSA's faulty air bag regulations that caused the spate of deaths in the first place, the agency should trust the automakers this time.
If NHTSA won't heed the industry's warnings that its mandate could endanger the driving public, Congress should step in and see that it does.
I am glad that the government has mandated certain safety procedures over the years though. If some are ineffective or not worth the trouble...that's debatable I guess.
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