The importance of seat belts.

The impact threw 15-year-old Nick Alfrey’s body from the passenger’s side of his friend’s vehicle into the field at 222^nd Street and West Center Road, where he was quickly pronounced dead.

            Alfrey was riding home from a church meeting May 4, 2004; drinking or speeding was not a factor.  Unfortunately, Nick also wasn’t using his seat belt.

            A pickup truck going 60 mph struck the vehicle Alfrey was in and sent him through the windshield in a matter of seconds.  His life ended there.

            Had he been wearing a seat belt, Alfrey might still be here today.

            “Every time [I] buckled that seat belt in the months following, it was kind of in the back of my mind,” said Taylor Arehart, 20, Alfrey’s old classmate.  “Now my car won’t leave the parking lot unless everyone is buckled up.”

            The seat belt is the greatest single piece of personal protective equipment that we’ve been able to devise, said Bill Mulherin, vice president of traffic programs for the National Safety Council, Greater Omaha Chapter.

            If people aren’t belted into their seat during a collision, Mulherin said, their body will most likely be ejected from the vehicle and hit something hard – like the law of inertia.

            Isaac Newton’s first law of motion can be directly paralleled to the mechanics of a car crash.  The law says that an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by another force.

            In a car crash, the seat belt acts as the other force so the passenger’s body continues to stay with the car.  With no seat belt, coming to an abrupt stop means the passenger will continue to move forward at the same speed the car was moving.

“An unrestrained driver or passenger keeps going until he or she is stopped by another collision, such as with the steering wheel, the windshield, or the pavement outside the car’s window,” according to the National Safety Council, Greater Omaha Chapter’s “Click It Don’t Risk It” campaign Web site, www.clickitdontriskit.com.

When a seat belt is worn properly, it gives a passenger a 55 percent better chance of surviving a crash, Mulherin said.

            In the beginning, lap belts were the only kind of safety belt.  Although they keep the body strapped into the seat, they allow the body to fold and hit the dashboard, causing head injuries.

            “Since everything that makes us what we are is in our heads, if you’re having head injuries, it sort of eliminates the need for having [seat belts] in the first place,” Mulherin said.  “So they went to the three-point seat belts.”

            A properly worn three-point safety belt comes over the shoulder and fits snuggly about the waist.

            “It actually provides the belt over the strongest parts of the body; the parts that are most likely to absorb the crash without injury,” Mulherin said.

            UNO graduate student Kristin Logan, 26, learned the importance of the three-point belt the hard way.

            On July 7, 2000, just after she had graduated high school, Logan’s boyfriend at the time was driving the two home through a rainstorm in her ’94 Ford Escort.  They were crossing the dangerous intersection of 168^th and State Streets - an area nicknamed “the State Street jump” due to a hazardous hill many high school students like to “fly” over, often times while intoxicated.

            In the midst of lightening and gushing rain, the car hydroplaned down a hill and flew off the opposite side of the road, hitting a tree head on from nearly 40 mph.

            Logan was wearing her seat belt partially right.  The seat belts in her car stuck in a certain position when the doors were shut and blocked the driver’s, so they unbuckled the top portion of their seat belts, leaving only the lap belt as their safety harness.

            When her car came in contact with the tree, Logan hit her head on the dashboard, split her head open, bit through her tongue and broke several of her teeth.  She also left the scene with torn ligaments in her left elbow and massive bruises on her lower abdomen and hipbones, causing the doctors to fear internal injuries. 

            “People thought [the bruising] was really terrible,” Logan said.  “I was like, ‘No, this is fine, these bruises on my hips - the alternative would be me going through the windshield.’”

            Logan said her lap belt saved her life. 

            “The tree that we hit was right on the brink of a stream below.  So, it’s like, a 40-foot drop off,” Logan said.  “So we would have probably went through the windshield and straight down into there and then when someone showed up they would see a car that was wrecked and they would hopefully be able to figure out that people had gone down.  Who knows if we would be living or not? I kinda suspect not.”

She also believes that having a shoulder strap could have prevented the damage to her teeth and head.

Mulherin agrees with Logan; the shoulder strap keeps the upper body away from the dashboard and away from harm – but Mulherin, like many others, didn’t think much of the seat belt and its unique power until his own experience.

“New Jersey passed a law requiring seat belt use for drivers, and I pretty much had the 

idea that I wasn’t going to let the government tell me what to do in my car – never mind the 

government regulates vehicle design, vehicle manufacture, tolls, licensing and insurance,”

 Mulherin said.  “I’d always assumed that if I was in an accident it would be a rear ender 

accident, and I further assumed that it wouldn’t be my fault and I would be fine.”

  But in May of 1989, Mulherin was stopped on a four-lane road, waiting to make a left-

hand turn into a driveway.   A vehicle going 60 mph hit Mulherin from behind – and no safety 

belt was holding Mulherin to his seat.

 “It was exactly the type of accident I thought I’d be in,” Mulherin said.  “My assumptions 

were partially correct; I did get pushed back into my seat, but I failed to take into account the 

rebound action, and I came forward and hit the steering wheel with my chest.  I broke the 

steering column - got fortunate and wasn’t seriously injured.  I kind of woke up that day and 

said, ‘You know what? I don’t care about the law, I’m more in it for me.’ Unfortunately, it took 

an accident.”

Waiting for an accident to happen before seat belts are used is unfortunately a common theme.  Mulherin attributes this thought process to rebellion.  Younger drivers don’t want to be told what to do by the law or otherwise, so in an act of defiance they don’t wear a safety harness.

“Yeah, they’re right, they have that control,” Mulherin said.  “But what has to happen is 

each of us have to come to the point where we realize, ‘If I violate the law, the government isn’t 

going to shed any tears – my parents will, my friends will, but the law and the government isn’t 

going to. So I need to make these choices for me, because of me.  If there’s a law in there, that’s 

nice, but this really is a self-preservation type of thing.’”

And, for a lot of people, it’s hard to understand that a fatal car crash can happen to anyone. 

“For many people, our typical experience in cars is this: we get in the car, we arrive to 

where we want to be, we don’t have any issues,” Mulherin said.  “And so we misunderstand the 

actual risks we’re taking when we’re behind the wheel. We don’t actually give those risks the 

‘do’ that they deserve.”

Such was the case for Arehart.  Even with the loss of her friend, she decided to get into a 

car once more with no seat belt.  

            “I was not the driver, but the passenger,” Arehart said.  I was not wearing a seatbelt and I can’t even remember why I didn’t put it on. Thankfully, I was not seriously injured, but I could have been. I think I was given a friendly reminder, ‘Think about it Taylor, you know what can happen.’”

            It doesn’t have to take an accident to turn someone on to seat belts. Parents have a huge responsibility in teaching their kids between safe and unsafe.  And, parents are more likely than peers to influence their child’s seat belt use, according to research conducted in 2008 from a team of University of Nebraska at Omaha students promoting seat belt usage among tweens.

            Along with parental action, The National Safety Council, Greater Omaha Chapter has helped increase seat belt usage and awareness through their “Click It Don’t Risk It” campaign.  Since the campaign started in 2002, Mulherin has seen the rates of individuals wearing seat belts rise over 80 percent.

Mulherin wants people riding in cars to think about the risks they’re willing to take and to 

think about what the real risks are – not just what is perceived.

“The reality of it is, every time you get in a car and drive, there’s a risk,” Mulherin said.  

“You can’t make that risk go away, so we have to take steps in advance to lessen that risk to 

ourselves.”

            Perhaps Alfrey wasn’t aware of the great risk he was taking the night he died.  His death is just one of the 42,000 to 44,000 auto deaths that take place in the U.S. every year.

            “We will never know if things would have come out differently if Nick had been wearing his seat belt,” Arehart said.  “We can only hope that out of the tragedy came something good, and that could be people realizing they have to wear seatbelts for protection.”

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 Current NE laws, according to Mulherin and www.clickitdontriskit.com:

-       For teens and drivers operating on provisional operator’s permits, whether they’re operating or passengers, if they’re under 16 they must be wearing a seat belt no matter where they are in the car.

-       For young children who require car seats, they have to be in an appropriate restraint system for the size and weight of the child.

-       For adults over 18 or those driving on full drivers licenses, Nebraska law requires that you wear seat belts when you’re in the front driver or passenger seat.

-       The fine for not wearing a seat belt is $25, and the driver and passengers can be fined separately.