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Should There be a Standard for the Placement of Airbag Inflators?
Is it just me, or is it about time for the vehicle manufacturers to develop a standard for the placement of airbags and their stored gas inflators? With the way vehicles are designed these days to absorb the impact by crumpling around the driver/passengers, you would think that the manufacturers would try and work with the Fire Service and make it easier on us to extricate patients!
With the current airbag requirements, we're starting to see a standard in airbag placement, (driver, passenger, side curtain, knee area, etc.), but nothing in the way of stored gas inflator placement. They are placed in the A-posts, C-posts, D-posts, roof rail above the B-post, etc. We have to spend valuable time doing a "peel & peek" to find where they're placed before we can begin cutting the vehicle to remove our patients!
If they could develop a standard for the placement for airbag stored gas inflators, I believe it would save valuable time and improve rescuer safety. What do we as the Fire Service need to do to make this happen?
With the current airbag requirements, we're starting to see a standard in airbag placement, (driver, passenger, side curtain, knee area, etc.), but nothing in the way of stored gas inflator placement. They are placed in the A-posts, C-posts, D-posts, roof rail above the B-post, etc. We have to spend valuable time doing a "peel & peek" to find where they're placed before we can begin cutting the vehicle to remove our patients!
If they could develop a standard for the placement for airbag stored gas inflators, I believe it would save valuable time and improve rescuer safety. What do we as the Fire Service need to do to make this happen?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by T.J. on
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I here you all the way Brian, the "golden hour" is gone now a days because of all this. They all need to be on the same page.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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There is no practical way to legislate or enforce this idea. Every manufacturer comes up with different technologies. This equates to different ways to build the cars.
The type of government regulation you are asking about used to be "construction" standards. Construction standards make it easy to enforce the standard, because everything is built the same. The problem with this is that it stifles industry innovation and slows the development and implementation of new technology.
Government regulation is now oriented at "performance" standards. Performance standards regulate what the desired end result is supposed to be, but does not force every manufacturer to do everything exactly the same, or force them to do it the same way.
If you force construction standards on the auto industry, you run into another problem. If you choose, say, Ford's way to build and install air bag inflators over the methods used by GM, BMW, Volvo, or Mercedes-Benz, then you are giving an unfair competitive advantage to Ford.
That's illegal under several federal laws including patent law and the Interstate Commerce Act.
The result is the fairly random placement and design of SRS air bag inflators, the inflator types, and what it takes to cut around them during an extrication. That's not likely to change.
What is important to rescuers is that we start exposing the inside of roof posts and actually look at what's inside where we're going to cut instead of just blindly cutting posts. We should have been doing that all along. The extra 30 to 60 seconds it takes to "pry and peek" don't significantly impact the patient's Golden Hour. The broken cutter blades that result from cutting into fortified steels, patient and rescuer injuries that might result from cutting into pyrotechnic charges or gas inflator systems, and extrication delays resulting from wasting time cutting blindly instead of paying attention waste a lot more of the Golden Hour than simply taking a few seconds to actually look and plan a few roof post cuts.
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Permalink Reply by Kimberly A Bownas on
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i agree with Ben, you have to look at what your going to do before you just blindly do it. When you are extricating a patient from a vehicle you have to take your time anyway to make sure that what you are doing isn't going to injure the patient. Taking the extra 30 seconds or so to do a peel and peek is not a big deal and safer for the rescuer. We take the plastic off when we are going to cut one of the posts anyway to make it easier to see that we made a complete cut. I agree that the airbags are dangerous for us if we don't pay attention but that is were we need to continue to train and educate ourselves on the new technology....
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Permalink Reply by Michael Bates on
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Don't forget it's not just the inflators for air bags, but pretensioner equipment as well. the real standard should be for the 12 volt battery location. If you get that shut down it's more than half the battle, especially in hybrids.additionally when you factor in ultra high strength steel and these protected " roll cages" such as volvo xc90 we are gonna start having a real hard time extricating on newer vehicles.
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Permalink Reply by Brian Dumser on
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I never said it would be easy, but I'm sure there's some Lawyers out there that could craft the standard in a way that's fair to all. I'm also NOT advocating cutting blindly, I'm merely looking for some type of standard so that 5-15 years down the road, vehicle extrications could be a little safer for rescuers.
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If you expose the car components down to the metal prior to cutting a post or using a car part as a purchase point for a spreader or a ram, it is very unlikely that you will accidentally trigger a SRS restraint device such as an air bag, side air curtain, or seatbelt pre-tensioner.
Every documented case of rescuers accidentally triggering a SRS device during an extrication violated this rule. Blind cuts into roof posts without "pry and peek" cut through SRS pyrotechnic charges, gas generators, etc. The legendary Dayton air bag incident was triggered by using a purchase point that had not been stripped down to the bare metal.
As for finding and disabling the 12V battery, obviously that's a good thing if you can. However, if the battery is under the rear seat, or if the car is rolled over and you can't access the battery, for example, then you have to do the extrication in a way that doesn't risk triggering the SRS systems.
Extricating from a car wreck is just like treating a trauma patient - you can't treat what you can't see. Expose, expose, expose, and actually LOOK, and you'll eliminate virtually all problems associated with rescuer-induced SRS activation or component explosive failures.
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Good point with the battery location. That should be a standard as well, with some vehicles these days having 2 batteries, not to mention the Hybrids. pretensioners on the other hand, are usually easy to locate.
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My point is that if you don't cut blindly, then being able to access the battery to shut down the SRS systems isn't nearly as important as it's been made out to be.
There have been fewer than 10 documented incidents of rescue-induced SRS deployments in the history of air bags, air curtains, and seatbelt pretensioners.
That's compared to probably a hundred extrications per day in the U.S. In other words, we spend a lot of time preparing for a problem that rarely occurs.
Statistically speaking, what you're talking about would add a huge expense to every vehicle sold in the U.S. in order to prevent a problem that rarely occurs and has never been fatal. Even a good lawyer is going to have difficulty crafting a law that would make it past the amount of regulatory scrutiny that law would recieve.
Vehicle extrications are pretty safe for rescuers right now. Just don't cut blindly and you won't trigger the SRS system - even if the electrical system hasn't been disabled.
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Permalink Reply by Mike Schlags (Captain Busy) Retd on
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but if you do trigger the SRS system, well... luckily the statistics are in our favor.
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If you are working a wreck where the 12V battery is not accessible, if you maintain the appropriate distance between rescuers and undeployed air bags, then the demonstration Mike showed won't matter to the rescuers. The 5-10-20 Rule covers this.
The rule is to maintain 20 inches of distance between rescuers and passenger-side frontal air bags, 10 inches between rescuers and the driver's side frontal impact bag, and 5 inches between rescuers and side impact bags. Here's a free, downloadable power point from Extrication.com that describes this rule. http://www.extrication.com/5-10-20%20Inch%20Rule%20Public/5-10-20%2...
A combination of using the 5-10-20 rule and avoiding blind cuts and prys will make accidental SRS deployment even more rare than it already is.
Accidental SRS demonstrations are spectacular, and they're a good educational tool. Most of them aren't very good at showing us how to actually find the battery and disarm the system when the car is overturned in a ditch at night, in the rain, with dying trauma patients trapped inside. They're also not very good at showing the VERY low rate of occurance involved in rescuer-induced SRS deployments, even given the amount of blind cutting that goes on in real life.
There are going to be times that you MUST extricate without being able to disarm the SRS system. Being able to extricate from a vehicle with an armed SRS system rather than just being able to disable the battery, wait a couple of minutes, then blindly cut the roof posts is one of the things that seperates the average extrication team from the really good extrication teams.
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Permalink Reply by Justin Buck on
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it would be nice but i dont think that will ever happen
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A required standard battery location would be an unfair limitation on automotive design, engineering, and sales. This goes right back to the current regulations requiring a "performance" standard rather than a "construction" standard. A return to the 1970's construction standards simply is not going to happen. If it were tried, the lawsuits regarding the violations of the Interstate Commerce Act would tie up the court system for years. Performance standards - and thus, every car manufacturer's right to build their own systems in any way that meets the standards - are here to stay.
It would be nice for the things we do to be simple. They are not. Complexity is the hallmark of a technology and information-based society. We can either embrace those complexities or be left behind by them.
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