Make hot car deaths a thing of the past
When I was young, every once in a while, a kid somewhere in the U.S. would crawl into a refrigerator and suffocate.
That’s because refrigerators had latches on the outside and you couldn’t open them from the inside.
In 1956 the Refrigerator Safety Act was passed. It read, in part: “It shall be unlawful for any person to introduce or deliver for introduction into interstate commerce any household refrigerator manufactured on or after the date this section takes effect unless it is equipped with a device, enabling the door thereof to be opened from the inside...”
Sure, only a handful of kids died this way every year. And manufacturers likely griped about how they couldn’t come up with cost effective, reliable technology to stop it. But you know what? They did. And as old refrigerators were replaced with new, safer refrigerators that had magnet closing systems, fewer children died in this horrible way.
So if you’re over 50, ask yourself, “When was the last time you heard of a kid suffocating in a refrigerator?”
Which brings me to July 31, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s National Heatstroke Prevention Day in which government, safety groups and reporters like me, try to make people aware of the danger of leaving children in hot cars.
The problem has grown with the use of back seat, rear-facing child seats, overly busy and complicated lives and, unfortunately, the growing role of men in childcare. The best article ever on this topic was written by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post in March 2009. I suggest you read it if you are interested in this topic, if you wonder how a parent could ever forget a child or if you think it could never happen to you.
Indeed, a child dying in a hot car is relatively rare. According to the nonprofit child safety group KidsandCars.org, as of July 27, 11 children in the U.S. have died in hot cars. The yearly average is 38. I’d guess it’s about as rare as refrigerator suffocation was back in the day.
But our response is different. Instead of the government requiring car manufacturers to address this issue, we vilify and punish parents by criminally charging them with neglect. We raise awareness. Folks come up with smartphone apps and products people can buy. And we offer tips on how to prevent it from happening.
I even have one I came up with last year: Take off your left shoe and put it in the back with the car seat.
I wanted some sort of passive reminder that you could get into the habit of doing and wouldn’t overlook. I called it #NEVERLEFT. I launched a Facebook page where I post articles tracking these kinds of deaths all over world.
Last week Evenflo announced it was marketing a new car seat that will prevent hot car deaths. It will be sold exclusively at Walmart starting in August. It has a sensor on the car seat buckle that syncs to a receiver plugged into the car’s computer. When the ignition is turned off and the child restraint is still engaged it will emit a tone to remind the caregiver a child is still buckled in.
This is a great invention and a good first start in preventing these types of deaths. And even though it’s a great idea, it’s an after-market purchase and I don’t think that’s the best way to attack this problem.
I believe the way to prevent child heat stroke deaths is for the government to take the same stance with car manufacturers as it did with appliance manufacturers in the 1950’s. Require them to develop technology that will prevent these deaths. Set a date for compliance. And mandate that every car manufactured after that date be equipped with the technology or it couldn’t be sold in the U.S.
Believe me, auto companies would come up with something and they would do it so fast it would make you wonder if they didn’t already have it.
Contact: TellMel@news-press.com; (239)344-4772; 2442 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Fort Myers, FL 33901. facebook.com/TellMel and Twitter @tellmel