Uncovering a fatal mystery: Why didn’t airbags deploy?
NHTSA officials are disputing the newspaper’s findings.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Brooke Katz died three months pregnant.
A hit-and-run motorist slammed into the front of the 2005 Dodge Caravan she was driving, spinning it 180 degrees.
“It’s one that sticks with me,” Atlanta Police Officer Shane Keller said recently. The crash was so violent that rescuers needed the Jaws of Life to free Katz, 27, a Georgia wife and mother who had just buckled herself in to go to work.
Then they saw something “curious,” as the officer put it. The Caravan’s airbags had not deployed.
It’s a fatal mystery repeated in hundreds of traffic accidents, an investigation by The Kansas City Star found: front airbags that did not inflate in deadly front-end crashes.
Analyzing a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database of all traffic fatalities over a six-year period, the newspaper discovered that far more people had died from wrecks where airbags didn’t deploy than all of those who died from injuries caused by airbags that fired too easily or too forcefully.
A decade ago, deaths blamed on overly aggressive airbags triggered congressional action, which brought about the so-called “smart bags” of today. About 300 people have died from improper airbag deployments since 1990.
But The Star found those deaths are dwarfed by another body count just as disturbing. At least 1,400 drivers and front-seat passengers died from 2001 through 2006 in front-impact crashes involving vehicles whose airbags — smart or otherwise — never deployed.
“I have to say I’m shocked,” said Joan Claybrook, former chief of NHTSA and current president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “These airbags should deploy.”
To be sure, even when airbags work, people still die in serious accidents.
In the six-year span analyzed by The Star, head-on crashes killed roughly 14,000 drivers and front-seat passengers, even though their airbags deployed.
But in that same period, the federal government has estimated that airbags saved 15,000 lives.
Nobody knows how many more lives could have been saved if the airbags had deployed in the cases reviewed by The Star. And because of insufficient data gathered by NHTSA, speeds for many of those wrecks also are undetermined, raising questions as to whether those vehicles were going fast enough to activate the airbags.
For those reasons and others, current NHTSA officials disputed The Star’s findings and don’t consider uninflated airbags to be a significant problem.
“There is never an acceptable failure rate,” said agency spokesman Rae Tyson. However, he insisted that it is impossible to draw any conclusions about the lack of deployments based on the agency’s data.
In a written statement, NHTSA warned that “The Kansas City Star is doing a grave disservice to its readers, by implying — through an improper analysis of our own data — that airbags are not performing as intended. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
A spokesman for the auto industry, Charles Territo of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said that “no two accidents are alike” and that conclusions can’t be drawn from the analysis without knowing more about each accident.
However, another former NHTSA administrator disagreed, calling the database the “best in the world.”
“Yes, it’s flawed. But it is the best you’ve got,” said Ricardo Martinez, who led the agency during the Clinton administration.
He said the newspaper’s findings point NHTSA “to an area that warrants investigation to see if there is an opportunity to improve safety.”
In its database analysis, The Star eliminated thousands of fatalities in an attempt to produce as conservative a finding as possible.
Finally, the newspaper consulted with automotive safety researchers, statisticians and other experts — including former NHTSA officials — in formulating its methodology for the analysis. All found it acceptable. And the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting in Columbia, Mo., examined the same database and confirmed The Star’s numbers.
Moreover, the NHTSA database reveals that the annual number of deaths in nondeployment crashes grew dramatically — about 50 percent — since 2001. In 2006 alone, the deaths rose by 14 percent from the previous year — despite a 2-percent drop in all traffic fatalities.
NHTSA declined to make top agency officials available for interviews.
Although its spokesman discounted The Star’s findings, he added that 1,400 deaths, if true, were not that alarming.
“If it’s a real number, it’s not a surprise to us,” Tyson said.