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Paralyzed officer demonstrates need for better roof crush standards
April 1st, 2009 by Kurt Niland
KGTV of San Diego recently published the tragically characteristic story of Luis Pena, a California border patrol agent whose truck rolled over a year and a half ago while he was driving one night while on duty. His truck’s roof caved in, compacting Pena’s body and crushing his spine.
“Halfway down my neck, there’s that vertebrae which is the C6, C7 vertebrae where it got dislocated,” Pena told KGTV. “It popped out and it dragged the spinal cord over with it and it created a tear and a pinch on the spinal cord, creating a quadriplegic.” Once a firefighter, police officer, and martial arts instructor, Pena now experiences constant pain in the 20% of his body that he can feel.
“I mean I’m still a father. I’m still a husband. You know, I’m still a counselor for people who want to talk about a lot of things. It’s hard to do all that when you’re in pain,” Pena told KGTV.
Consumer Reports, Public Citizen, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the People Safe in Rollovers Foundation, and a number of other consumer and safety advocates all agree that U.S. roof crush standards for automobiles are dangerously weak. Yet the U.S. government continually drags its feet when it comes to making any real improvements to roof strength standards. Every year, in the meantime, 10,000 people die because their vehicle roofs aren’t strong enough to withstand an appropriate level of force during a rollover accident.
Current roof crush laws, which were established nearly 40 years ago, require certain vehicles to withstand 1.5 times their own weight in static crush tests. The government proposed increasing that to 2.5 times the vehicle’s weight for vehicles up to 10,000 pounds, but even that improvement, widely criticized as insufficient, has met with delay after delay ever since it was first proposed in 2005 and scheduled to go into effect mid 2008.
Paula Lawlor, a roof crush safety activist and founder of People Safe in Rollovers, has been pushing for automobile roof strength improvements for years. She says that the current standard has always been too low. “It was never any good. It never protected people. The industry knew it,” she told KGTV of San Diego, explaining that the auto industry played a major role in writing the regulations back in 1973. Automobile manufacturers wrote the rules to accommodate weak standards already in place rather than establishing and adhering to tougher standards for the public’s sake.
Meanwhile, thousands of people will lose their lives or become critically injured like Luis Pena before auto manufacturers strengthen their roofs.
“I’m really appreciative that I’m still here. However, with that said and done, let’s do something about us — let’s prevent this from happening to someone else because I would not wish this on anybody,” Pena told KGTV.
