Sturdy Cars Make It Harder for First Responders

Today’s new cars save lives, with new design advances and reinforced construction cocooning motorists in safety. But those improvements have also brought an unexpected side effect for first responders – it’s harder to rescue people in these well-built cars.

The Associated Press’ Mitch Stacy says rescue officials and experts from around the United States are worried this new technology is hindering extrication of injured people, increasingly forcing crews to work deeper into the critical window of time between an accident and treatment by emergency room doctors.

“On many 2005 and later cars, an extrication that once took 10 or 15 minutes can now take twice that or longer,” Stacy says. “To catch up, counties and cities are spending tens of thousands of dollars – if they can afford it – to buy more powerful equipment that can cut through newer cars’ reinforced steel and the lighter, tougher exotic metals used in roofs, posts and doors.”

Stacy says the problem has first responders scrambling to update their tools and explore different ways to attack cars with their cutters, spreaders and saws. Some agencies with equipment more than a few years old are arriving at accident scenes and finding out that it will no longer do the job. And workers on the scene still have trouble getting the latest technical information about newer cars and how to deal with them.

That’s why COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance, with cooperation from automakers, is introducing a single Web site later this year that will offer schematics and safety specs for most cars on the road, Stacy says. Rescue workers could flip open a laptop computer on the way to a crash scene to find out about the construction of the car, placement of air bag canisters and other details.

To read the full article, click here: http://federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=80&sid=1368612#