By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Automotive engineers have worked hard to make vehicles safer.
Vehicles now have air bags, crumple zones, and seat belts. The latter are particularly important, said Dr. Nick Sauber, an emergency room physician at Mercy Health Perrysburg.
All those safety devices only work if a person is confined to the passenger compartment—and that is what a safety belt does. Without the restraint provided by the belt, the person becomes a “meat missile,” and the injuries sustained are devastating.
Sauber was speaking at the launch of the 2023 Click It or Ticket enforcement initiative held at Mercy Health.
“So many things that cars do to keep us safe if and when we are in that accident … only work if we stay in that passenger compartment, if we stay in our seat,” he said.
“If you’re not wearing your seat belt, we have several crashes,” the physician said. “When your car’s going 70 miles per hours and suddenly stops, hits a semi, or hits a brick, the car stops suddenly. That’s one crash. The next part is your body moving.”
It can crumble under the dashboard “or you go up and over, turning it into a meat missile heading straight for that windshield, right for the back of that semi. Then your body hits that and all your internal organs slosh around, and they hit the inside of your body causing multiple points of injury.”
Sauber said sometimes firefighters will come in and show emergency room personnel photos of the vehicles involved in the crash. The front end is crushed. No one could survive that, they think. But the patient they see have some cuts, and a few bruises. They were wearing their seat belts.
“Then we see the people who aren’t wearing their seatbelt. … They’re ejected through the windshield while the vehicle is flipping. The injuries are devastating.,” Sauber said. “That’s the difference between someone wearing a seatbelt and staying in the protected passenger compartment and leaving that seat and becoming a projectile.”
Sandy Wiechman of Wood County Safe Communities Coalition reported that since 2021, 18 people, more than half the traffic fatalities in Wood County, were not wearing seat belts.
In front of the hospital’s entry way was a visible display of the toll – 98 pairs of shoes representing drivers and passengers injured on crashes because they were not buckled in.
Eighteen of those pairs of shoes were painted bright red representing the fatalities.
The emotional impact of these crashes resonates throughout the community, said Perrysburg Mayor Tom Mackin, who as a trial lawyer has both sued and defended people involved in fatal crashes. Not just victims and their family and friends are affected, but the first responders, and the health professionals, who treat them, and see injuries they cannot forget, as well as their families who live with their loved ones’ trauma.
Perrysburg Police Chief Pat Jones said: “We don’t want to have to say someone you loved isn’t coming home because they weren’t wearing their seat belt.”
Wiechman said the worst are the children who rely on adults to correctly secure them in their car seats or boosters.
The period around Memorial Day is a critical time, she said, “for law enforcement agencies to target unbuckled drivers. This is not a campaign to write tickets or train law enforcement. This is a campaign to keep people safe and alive.”
And, said Lt. Jordan L. Schwochow, Ohio State Highway Patrol, buckling up is the easiest way to accomplish that.
