Lest We Forget: 6 Seat-Belted Dead, 3 Un-Belted Survive
In 1976 the Province of Ontario enacted legislation requiring the use of seat-belts. On a wintery April in 1979, a church-going family of six adults put on their seat-belts and set out in their Oldsmobile on Highway 2 west of Woodstock, Ontario. They became involved in a head-on crash with a Chevrolet Impala occupied by three males who were not wearing seat-belts. The result? All the six seat-belted family members were killed. The three, un-belted males survived.
When I began my work as an accident investigator with the University of Western Ontario Multi-Disciplinary Accident Research Team in the fall of 1980, I observed a filing cabinet containing previous investigations. One thick file was marked “Governors Road”. Highway 2 was known as Governors Road. As I came through discussions with team members the details of the bazaar and tragic case came forward. Even though every file was no less tragic, some were not as bazaar.
Even in the short year or so that I was working with the team it became clear that the wearing of seat-belts was a great benefit when involved in a major collision. So how could it be that six persons who were wearing their seat-belts could be killed and, in the same collision, three persons who were not wearing their seat-belts survived? It was perplexing.
What became revealed is that the family of six had a religious belief that their seat-belts would protect them. They had a religious belief that the government that legislated seat-belts must be obeyed. So they religiously put on their seat-belts over their winter coats. In those days the rear seat contained lap belts only. Similarly, the centre seating position of the front seat also contained a lap belt. Autopies revealed that the family members sustained fatal, abdominal injuries from their lap belts. And so began my education about seat-belts and blind faith.
Through the decades I came to understand what I originally understood. Seat-belts save lives. Through the decades they have saved thousands of lives in Ontario alone. But we need to understand the ferociousness with which major collisions occur and the tremendous forces that need to be dealt with in a split second. More importantly, we need to understand that the wearing of a seat-belt can kill you when you do not think about what you are doing.
Every winter Canadians put on their winter coats, jump in their motor vehicle, put on their seat-belts and rush to some important location. But they do not recognize, nor has anyone told them, how important it is to focus on the proper wearing of their seat-belts. Even the modern, three-point belt with a pre-tensioner and accompanied by a multitude of air bags may not protect you from fatal seat-belt injuries if you do not think about what you are doing.
In earlier times one might have heard the comment that one should leave a slight bit of slack in the adjusted position of the torso (shoulder) belt. Why? Because you do want your torso (chest, head) to become restrained before the legs and pelvis. Why? Because when your torso becomes restrained your lower body is not and as your lower body moves forward with respect to your upper body you “submarine” under your lap belt. In other words, the lap belt rides up onto your abdomen.
Let us be clear about the human abdomen. Looking from the front, there is nothing but soft tissue and vital organs. There is nothing but soft tissue until you reach your spine at the back of the abdomen. When major organs such as the liver, intestines, etc, receive a major force they rupture and tear. If you sustain such injuries in the rural environment you must get to an operating room in an extreme hurry and sometimes that is not possible. So you need to avoid those abdominal injuries.
Secondly, you need to understand that a lap belt was not meant to be placed on your abdomen. The lap belt was designed to be placed on the bony pelvis located just below the abdomen. So many times in my career the phrase “illiac crests” was ingrained in my head because this is where the lap belt must rest. It must rest below the crest of the bony ilium. If you place the lap belt above the bony illiac crests and you are involved in a major impact there is no engineering or medical miracle that can save you from major injury.
Thirdly, you need to understand that you cannot have slack in the lap belt, it must rest tightly against your body. Seat-belt slack will kill you. When your lap belt is slack you will submarine under your lap belt for the same reason as mentioned above, by allowing your lower body to move forward before your upper body. Modern engineering has helped with the equipping of “pre-tensioners” that will pull on the seat-belt webbing just before deceleration occurs and thus the slack is removed. But if you have misplaced your lap belt onto your abdomen beforehand, the pre-tensioner will not help you.
A critical point is that in wintertime occupants put their seat-belts over top of their heavy coats without thinking about the amount of slack that will be created. Think. When you put your seat-belt webbing over top of your heavy coat how much slack or your creating? How far is the webbing away from your body? You must unzip or unbutton your heavy coat and place it to the sides of your body and then you must pull on the webbing to bring it close to your skin, while also pushing it down so that it does not sit high onto your abdomen. This should be done every time you put on a seat-belt, even in summer conditions.
What is more important is that improper seat-belt use is more dangerous for children because children do not fit as well into the geometry of seat-belt systems made for adults. It took far too many years for booster cushions to become available and in those many years many children suffered fatal and major injuries. Even with booster cushions seat-belt placement and adjustment is crucial and parents need to understand this.
The phrase “Lest We Forget” was coined over the “war to end all wars” and Remembrance Day on November 11th in Canada is a time to reflect on the sacrifices of those millions who perished. Similarly, a vast number of motor vehicle occupants have perished. In many ways both sources of death have been needless. While it is important not to forget, we must also think about what it is that needs to be remembered. It needs to be remembered that each life is precious and it is critical to bring it to its natural, old age. Violent death of an otherwise healthy being is not natural, it is tragic, especially when it is unnecessary.
Hwy 401 – Preparations for Another Round of Traffic Documentations
This newly installed portion of the High Tension Cable Barrier along Highway 401 has already been struck just west of West Lorne, Ontario and has (so far) not been repaired. How will such incidents be handled in the future?
How will the new installation of High Tension Cable Barriers between Chatham and London, Ontario be repaired in a timely fashion after sustaining impact damage? That is an important question. This is one of many important issues facing Highway 401 between Chatham and London, Ontario.
In order to get some base data before the snow flies Gorski Consulting is pressing to conduct yet another traffic documentation session along Highway 401 between Chatham and London. This issue is important because a substantial length of the High Tension Cable Barrier has now been installed between London and Tilbury. More of the cable barrier installations will continue in 2019. Meanwhile we want to get some base data on traffic motions prior to that installation. We have selected a location which we believe will be suitable however we do not want to reveal its location in case drivers learn of it and change their normal behaviours. It is imperative in any research study that naturalistic data is gathered without the influence of any biasing factors. Thus we will reveal the location once the study is completed.
Highway 407 Fuel Tanker Fire & Double Fatal – Research To Find Similar Causes
A single vehicle on Highway 401 yet it wanders into a terminating lane. Why?
The following photos depict a single vehicle’s motion that was documented during our study of possible causes of collisions on major expressways such as Highways 401 or 407. Signage was present for over 1 kilometre warning this driver that the right lane was terminating. Yet, as we see in this sequence, the vehicle wanders fully into the ending lane and then returns to its original position.
We do not know what caused the tanker truck to veer across the lanes of Highway 407 on October 31, 2018. The truck reportedly rolled over the concrete median barrier and was eventually consumed by the intense fire. What we can do is conduct close examinations of vehicle motions on these roads and try to find possible causes. Gorski Consulting uses multiple video cameras, set-up within a perimeter of about half of a kilometre, to study what kind of problems occur on Highway 401. Events such as the one shown here happen on a regular basis and it is important to understand their frequency. From there we might come to also understand why they occur. It is only through the collection of this objective data that we can reach some useful conclusions.
Yes, Speed May Kill, But Acceleration May Be The Silent Killer
This promotional photo of a 2019 Dodge Hellcat Redeye boasts of a 797 horsepower engine, and goes from 0-97 km/h in 3.4 seconds. Impressive.
A while ago a visiting acquaintance with a past life in auto racing asked me to step into his high performance sports car for a “short ride around the block”. Just after pulling out of my driveway on a residential speed he accelerated to 110 km/h before he reached the traffic light just 200 metres ahead. Surprised at this unannounced action I could only conger up a quick glimpse of Princess Diana as a madman accelerated into the Paris Alma tunnel. Knowing my background in collision reconstruction and our various discussions on topics somewhat related to our backgrounds I could only suppose that this was done to make an impression, and it did. But maybe not the impression that was intended.
By now I can say my collision investigations have run into the low thousands, although I stopped counting. I can recount many investigations of “Hold my beer and what this!” moments where the result ended very badly. You become somewhat immune to the tragedies when you are dissecting the details of how a certain body part became detached, or you fail to become horrified when you are working the interior of a vehicle covered in brain matter. What can you say to an experienced race car driver who believes that a residential street is not much different than a race track?
The point is that many of us in North America have grown up in the culture of muscle cars, status, independence and personal freedom. Our grandfathers impressed our fathers and our fathers impressed us with the latest increase in power and speed developed in the back bay of the local garage. But somewhere the romance of the olden days must come to an end. You can only go so fast to the nearby variety store and once you get there, what then? You race back again? Impressive.
We hear, see and read of the continual fatalities that occur and it is said over and over: Speed kills. Well, from my experience, yes, speed kills, but there is another killer in the room: Acceleration. Acceleration is what fools so many of us because it violates our expectations. The old grandmother pulling away from a stop sign does so at a low acceleration and takes too long to cross the road. She sees a car a block away but expects that vehicle is too far away to reach her. Yet, that distant car is driven by a novice young male accelerating his muscle car from a block away and wants to let it loose for someone’s impression. Differences in these accelerations mean expectations are violated and bad things happen.
Pedestrians suffer the same. Expecting to cross in time before a vehicle reaches them they do not realize that the vehicle is accelerating to a higher speed and a bad consequence is the result.
Left turning drivers also suffer the same. A driver waits to make a left turn while studying the approaching traffic. He sees a gap in traffic and, judges he can make the left turn in safety. But the gap in the vehicles closes as the driver passing though is worried about being late for work and does not want to be stopped if the traffic light turns red, so he accelerates to a higher speed and the gap closes. The left turning driver already commits to the turn and it is too late. A bad thing happens.
So while we talk so much about speed. But we almost never talk about acceleration, the silent killer, who violates our expectations. Much like I, stepping into the muscle car of my acquaintance, and not expecting the massive acceleration that unfolded which could have resulted in my last ride.
Hwy 407 Tanker Truck Fire – Further Analysis
Constable Kerry Schmidt, speaking on behalf of the OPP investigation into the fiery tanker truck collision of yesterday, reported that investigators now believe that both of the vehicles that were engulfed by the fire on Highway 407 on the outskirts of Toronto were travelling westbound and therefore both were projected over the concrete median barrier into the eastbound lanes. While the OPP have all the evidence that neither I or anyone else can examine, it should be noted that such a happening would be extremely rare. If the median barrier was 110 centimetres tall it would be just slightly taller than the roof of a typical passenger car that might be in the range of 140 centimetres above the ground. An SUV might be in the range of 160 centimetres and pick-up trucks with high suspensions would be even taller. More importantly the vertical centre-of-gravity of any of these vehicles would be substantially less than the height of the median and this is why it is very difficult to project a typical, light vehicle over the concrete median. It was speculated that somehow the two vehicles became entangled and the tanker truck could have pulled the smaller vehicle over the barrier with it. Fact can sometimes be stranger than fiction but one must recognize that such an occurrence would be very rare and I have not seen such an occurrence in all my 38 years of studying thousands of major collisions. The technical term used in computerized simulation software is called “snagging” and there are options to invoke such conditions when running a computer simulation. However, invariably, such snagging occurs in horizontal motions when, for example, a stiff wheel becomes jammed inside the crushed wheelwell of the other collision partner. The difficulty with dragging both vehicles over the barrier is in producing enough of a snag, and enough of a vertical force, to get the smaller vehicle’s centre-of-gravity over the wall.
There has to be some obvious reason why the OPP have come to their conclusion. This may be from witness information or from specific physical evidence they may have found on the near side of the barrier, for example, showing a paint scraping or some other evidence that could be matched to that smaller vehicle. Because both vehicles were likely fully consumed by the fire it would be difficult to obtain such detailed evidence from the vehicle bodies themselves. Without having an opportunity to examine the evidence I can only commit to my comment that propelling both vehicles over this relatively tall barrier is difficult to imagine.
Further study of the dashcam video using a video editing program suggests that, from the instant the truck began to pitch over the barrier up to the time that the first evidence of visible flames was only about 3 seconds. It is difficult to be precise here because the view from the dashcam is from a substantial distance and other westbound vehicles were partially blocking the view. However, this 3 seconds is a very short time. It is more understandable if a leakage developed some time after the vehicles came to rest and something ignited the fumes. The fact that this fire erupted so quickly is more of a concern because it could demonstrate a vulnerability of fuel tankers that may not have been known up to this time. It needs to be identified what parts of the truck were found on the near side of the barrier to establish what parts became detached before the pitching over the barrier and whether those parts can explain the early fractions of a second when some separations might have occurred leading to the opening of the fuel into the environment. Again these are matters that experienced investigators would pay close attention to.
Another matter of importance is the study of the initial incident that led to the truck’s dramatic motion across the westbound lanes and toward the barrier. From studying hundreds of loss-of-control collisions I have observed that the initiation of visible tire marks that indicate a loss-of-control occur substantially after the event that led to that loss-of-control. In other words, whatever police find in terms of tires, those marks are not likely to identify the location where the emergency condition occurred. There are exceptions where a very sudden failure of a mechanical component produces an immediate gouge, scrape or tire mark. Much depends on the experience of police investigators in their ability to understand the physical evidence they are dealing with. One cannot simply walk into the role of accident reconstruction by taking a few weeks of courses without having a solid number of years of experience in examining and interpreting physical evidence. Those police who are involved in Collision Reconstruction units are introduced to a lot of physical evidence in a very short space of time and therefore they can become adept at interpreting such evidence in 5 or 10 years time. Unfortunately such officers become re-deployed to other departments just as they become the most useful in their field. But that is another matter that needs discussion on another day.
A number of vehicles were in the vicinity of the far right lanes where the truck was located just before it made its dramatic left motion. This may provide the opportunity for police to piece together the witness accounts into something that could be useful. Again, from my experience of conducting many such analyses, witness information can sometimes be good and accurate while in many cases it can be quite scattered, imprecise and worse. The wisdom of a dedicated and detail-oriented analyst can separate what reported evidence is reliable.
It should not need to be emphasized that the loss of innocent lives requires that we do our utmost to prevent such tragedies in the future, where possible.
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