Belts beat odds in a bad wreck

Fasten your seat belts: It’s Monday Mail.

Belts

I wrote a June 23 piece on using seat belts because the Alabama highway patrol was sending so many reports of fatal one-car wrecks in which the driver was “not using a seat belt.”

Since then at least one more has been reported: A 30-year-old woman died when her 2001 Ford Explorer went off U.S. 80 outside Phenix City and overturned, ejecting her.

Rollover

With today’s high-tech auto safety features, it’s hard to imagine that seat belts once were not standard. Milton Jones remembers those days:

Tim,

I meant to write you yesterday but a retiree’s day is full of activities — meals, naps, etc.

I commend you on the article encouraging seat belt use. I am a long time user of seat belts and know, not just strongly believe, but know that they save lives, injuries, pain and all kinds of bad things. I personally had Gene Miller, “Mr. Widetrack” for those of us old enough to remember his Pontiac dealership on Fourth Avenue, order me a 1963 Pontiac Bonneville with a factory installed seat belt 53 years ago.

That was the only way you could get one fastened to the frame back then. I was a freshman representative in the Legislature and the Speaker, a great guy named George T. Smith, was involved in a wreck in Mississippi. He had seat belts in his automobile. His wife, Eloise, as sweet a lady as ever lived, had just unbuckled her seat belt to reach into the back seat to get something when they head-oned another vehicle. George did not have a scratch on him. Eloise suffered severe injuries. I got that belt in my next car….

I had a friend who worked with my mother back in the 1950s when I was still in high school. He was headed home after work one afternoon. He had a wreck, not his fault, at 45th Street at its intersection of Armour Road (this was back before the Manchester Expressway was built). He was ejected from his pickup truck, which in all of the bouncing around turned over on him. He laid there, pinned under his truck, screaming and begging someone to please shoot him and put him out of his agony. He made it to the hospital but died the next day. The truck was only lightly damaged, and they drove it to his home after the wrecker pulled it back over on its wheels. If he had a belt on (there were none back then) and stayed inside that truck, he would probably be a great grandfather today.

Further, in my law practice, I was involved in several lawsuits, plaintiffing in some and defending in others. There were several in which fatalities occurred, and others with severe, painful and life-changing injuries. In a few of these, you could have had 15 seat belts on and it would not have made any difference, but in every one of the fatalities I had experience with, I think all of them would have survived except one. Many injuries would have at worst only been a visit to the ER and dismissal. Without a belt they were painful and debilitating, costing lots of money and time lost from work, if not total disability. Dollars, in other words, not just pain and disability.

I wish people were required to spend some time in an ER and watch folks who had been in wrecks come in. The human body is a frail, soft, weak organism. It is similar to a balloon mostly filled with liquid, some air, and a skeleton not overly strong but capable of shattering into sharp shards when broken and inflicting severe internal injuries.

When you are subjected to sudden severe external forces as in a collision very bad things happen to you. The worst threat, however, is not just being hurled around inside the passenger compartment and impacting dashes, steering wheels, etc. at high velocity. It is being ejected from the passenger compartment. If you end up outside of the car, or partially out of a window or sun roof, you are probably going to die, and probably it will be excruciatingly painful….

Don’t take my word for it. Ask ER personnel and police officers who work traffic accidents. I am pretty sure the vast majority would tell you to wear the belt.

Milton Jones.

Dear Milton:

I think wearing seat belts cuts down on road rage, too, because drivers get so mad they forget to unbuckle before they try lunging from their seats to kick someone’s butt.

This story was originally published July 17, 2016 at 4:35 PM with the headline "Belts beat odds in a bad wreck."