Protect Your Precious Cargo – Keep Your Children Safely Secured In Your Vehicle
Everyone needs to get from one place to another and many people drive a car. When you’re driving and transporting children, wouldn’t you consider child car seat safety? Parents rely on child safety seats to protect their children, but it is not unusual that there could be a defect in the seat making it extremely hazardous. The Pennsylvania product liability lawyers at the Philadelphia law firm of Reiff and Bily have been researching and handling numerous defective car seat cases since 1979.
In March of 2008, Evenflo Discovery seats were being recalled due to a flaw that the child seat would fail during a side-impact crash. During testing, a ram struck the vehicle’s side at 38.5 miles an hour. The portion of the seat in which a child would be strapped in broke free of the base. The base anchors the seat to the car and the seat was thrown around the interior of the car. This was not the first time a child safety seat was recalled. In 2007, there was 11 recalls of child seats, totaling about 3.35 million seats as reported by The New York Times.
Some of the more common car seat defects include weak shells, defective handles, flammable materials, base or shell separation and weak construction, sudden releases due to defective harnessing systems, and unanticipated rotation. Other factors that could influence how safe a car seat is are the car seat’s angle of recline, the type of chest straps, shoulder harness slots and tightness, tray and t-shields on the child seat, vehicle-seat incompatibility, shell fracturing, and an unstable base for the seat. Problems can also arise from improper child seat installation. Improper installation or defective car seats could result in serious injury or even death.
A study from The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation reported in 2005 that from 2000-2001 and 2003-2005, 83% of the children under age 4 who were in a car accident and used a child safety seat sustained no injuries. Only 65.8% of children that did not have the proper safety restraint during an accident were not injured, resulting in 34.2% of children being injured or killed. While some children were injured using a child safety seat, around 16.5%, the risk of injuries is much less than a child who is not restrained. To help prevent injures, the safety seat still has to be manufactured and installed correctly.
I recommend finding a NHTSA child seat-inspected station in your area to check if seat installation was proper. You can find a local station from their website. I also recommend checking to see how safe your child seat is and check for manufacture recalls reports.
The Pennsylvania product liability lawyers at Reiff and Bily work on a contingent fee basis, charging a small percentage of the recovery. They will not get paid one cent unless there is a successful recovery. They have had handled numerous defective car seat cases and have successfully recovered in excess of $150 million dollars from their opponents for physical injuries and emotional damages.
If you are in need of an attorney because you or someone you love has suffered due to a defective car seat or restraint system, please call the experienced Pennsylvania product liability lawyers at the law firm of Reiff and Bily.
