Causes and cures take time for highway accident investigators
Tragic roadway accidents such as the Jan. 5 Pennsylvania Turnpike crash that killed five in Mount Pleasant inevitably lead to extensive investigations, sometimes taking two years or more as experts review every detail of what happened.
Their goal is to determine the cause of the incident, which can range from something as simple as driver error or as complex as poor vehicle design. Their hope is to recommend a cure to prevent another accident from happening.
Kathy Nantel, vice president of communications and advocacy for the National Safety Council, said there are two ways to develop safety improvements: incident investigation and computer simulation. As a former spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board, she has been at the scene of too many fatal incidents.
“We’re having to learn these safety improvements on the backs of tragedies,” she said. “If we’re waiting for accidents … we’re doing this in blood.”
In the turnpike crash, investigators will look at thousands of details such as the condition of the driver, the bus and the road surface; the type and frequency of application of material to deal with persistent light snow that fell that night; positioning and availability of road signs; whether the design of the bus led to injuries and fatalities; and the physical design of the road.
They also will interview surviving passengers, other motorists, emergency personnel and doctors who treated the victims to learn what they can about every aspect of the incident.
Investigators may or may not reach a conclusion from this accident that leads to substantial changes, but that wouldn’t be surprising. In its 50th anniversary review in 2017, the NTSB said it had made about 14,500 recommendations for changes as a result of its work, which includes investigating aviation incidents as well as certain highway, ship and railway accidents and pipeline incidents. About 80% of the recommendations have been implemented.
The safety board is an independent agency charged by Congress with investigating and recommending changes, but changes are implemented by the appropriate federal agency such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The investigation, the research, the trying to identify what happened and why is effort worth doing,” said David Zuby, vice president and chief research officer for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “That’s the only way you’re going to find a possible solution.”
Improvements after tragedy
In the last 35 years, three highway accidents stand out for the improvements that resulted after extensive investigations by police, design engineers, the National Transportation Safety Board and others.
• May 14, 1988: Three adults and 24 children on a school bus were killed in an accident with a drunken driver in Carrollton County, Ky.
• Sept. 20, 1995: A 5-month-old child was killed in Long Beach, Calif., when the front-seat airbag in the car she was riding in deployed and smashed her car seat.
• June 20, 1998: A Greyhound bus driver, on his last assignment before retiring, and six passengers were killed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Huntingdon County when a bus struck a semitractor-trailer parked alongside the road.
The Kentucky school bus accident occurred when a drunken driver going the wrong way on Interstate 71 crashed into a church group returning from Kings Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio. The older model bus caught fire and trapped victims that included children inside, many of them crowded in the aisle trying to escape.
The investigation of the crash led to major changes in school bus design, with more emergency exits in addition to the rear door, flame-retardant seat cushions and windows that are easier to push out to create an escape route.
“The learnings out of that were really significant,” Ms. Nantel said.
Those improvements followed major changes after crashes in the 1970s that led to higher, more-cushioned seats and stronger side and roof frames to reduce the chances of them collapsing in a crash.
The development of front and side airbags in vehicles that deployed automatically on impact was seen as a major safety step in the 1970s, when voluntary seat belt use was low. But incidents over the years showed some problems with the bags, culminating with the 1995 death of Jacqueline Licea.
After the toddler’s death, car manufacturers changed airbags so they don’t deploy with as much force. In addition, car seat manufacturers improved the quality of seats, and child safety seats no longer were recommended for use in the front seat.
Stephanie Shaw, a safety advocate at the NTSB and a volunteer who teaches parents how to properly install car seats, said improvements in car seats and the use of seat belts for adolescents have significantly reduced the number of children 14 and younger killed in vehicle crashes. Each state also has a Safe Kids Coalition to help parents learn the best way for their children to ride at different ages and sizes.
As a result, she said, the number of motor vehicle deaths for children 14 and younger has dropped from several thousand a year in the 1990s to about 1,100 a year today.
“Most of the children who are killed now are unrestrained,” Ms. Shaw said.
In the Greyhound accident, federal officials determined that the turnpike’s design for truck pulloffs was outdated, often providing a space 30 feet or less from the side of the road instead of the minimum of 40 feet required under federal rules. As a result, the state had to eliminate 175 of the 564 areas for resting truck drivers to park their rigs.
The turnpike has slowly replaced parking areas for trucks, but it is looking for more after rule changes limited how long drivers are allowed on the road.
Changes happen
Sometimes it doesn’t take one specific incident to lead to changes.
In the 1950s, according to retired safety expert Kenneth Kobetsky, who spent 30 years with the West Virginia Department of Transportation, a motorist in New York complained to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey about the high number of serious crashes involving vehicles hitting stiff, stationary roadside signs and poles. Initially, designers changed the signs so they weren’t as close to the highway; later, they developed the type of breakaway posts used today that reduce vehicle damage and injuries.
Police, safety experts and attorneys in the early 1990s noticed a large number of Ford SUVs involved in rollover accidents, eventually resulting in approximately 270 deaths. Investigators found two problems: a design that put an SUV body on a pickup truck chassis made the vehicle unstable, and Firestone tires that came apart when they weren’t properly inflated.
Occasionally, major changes can happen after incidents in which no one died, such as the January 2016 snowstorm that stranded nearly 500 vehicles on the Pennsylvania Turnpike between Bedford and Somerset for more than 24 hours. Some motorists were stranded without food and water — and had little contact with officials — after a semitractor-trailer jackknifed on the hill approaching Allegheny Mountain Tunnel during an unexpected snowfall of more than 36 inches.
A post-incident review by the agency led to 22 recommendations, including developing an emergency communication system to contact stranded motorists via cellphones.
Ms. Nantel said she has “great confidence” in the government review system for major incidents in the U.S.
“I’m always proud of what we do in the U.S. when a major incident happens because it’s not always done in other countries,” she said. “We dig, and when we find the problem, we fix it.”