WHEEL RIM TRAGEDY
Lewin, Tamar
Wheel rim tragedy Government investigations have faltered, but manufacturers face liability claims Tamar Lewin It can happen on the road or in the shop—wherever the metal ring that locks a truck...
...Meanwhile, the manufacturers are making few attempts to improve their safety record...
...Instead, they are devoting endless time and money to defending themselves against the lawsuits and drawing up charts that purport to show that servicing multi-piece rims is only as hazardous, statistically, as smoking 1.4 cigarettes or working two hours in a coal mine...
...The following March, NHTSA expanded its investigation to cover every multi-piece rim being manufactured in this country...
...Without warning, that heavy ring may shoot off like shrapnel, with force that can maim or kill...
...No one knows yet how much compensation will be claimed from the four manufacturers— Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Kelsey Hayes Co., and Budd Co.—but dozens of wheel rim cases have already been quietly settled out of court for as much as $1 million each...
...James W. Burks suffocated and died, his face crushed in a wheel ring explosion...
...In most cases, there is no public record of the settlements...
...And the rule-making is faring even worse...
...Were the illegal payments intended to influence the NHTSA wheel rim safety investigations...
...The story begins in 1969, when state officials in Utah, upset about a wheel rim accident at a local mining company, considered a state ban on a version of the rim made by Firestone...
...And late in March, President Reagan announced plans to end the probe entirely...
...I would hate to be confronted by a plaintiff's lawyer with another company's warning if my product did not have one," Downs wrote...
...According to a statement by Stans included in the Kansas City court papers, Goodyear came up with an additional $20,000 after Stans told the executive other companies were paying as much as $50,000...
...It was also in November 1971, court papers show, that Leonard Firestone, former director of Firestone Tire & Rubber and a national co-chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), contributed $100,000 to Richard Nixon's campaign...
...Still, the product liability proceedings clearly offer greater relief than the Government regulators...
...Government investigations usually move slowly, but the wheel rim investigation moved even more slowly than most...
...Both manufacturers say no, but circumstances cast doubt on their denials: As the court papers point out, Watergate figure Egil Krogh was Under Secretary of Transportation in 1972, when the investigation was diluted into a poster and wall chart safety campaign...
...The growing body of evidence has the manufacturers worried...
...The mechanics of the design are simple: Unlike car wheels, which are a single piece of metal holding a rubber tire, most larger vehicles have multi-piece wheels with a detachTamar Lewin is managing editor of The National Law Journal...
...About three-quarters of the trucks, buses, campers, and tractors on the road still use multi-piece rims, although there is a slow shift to the safer single-piece kind...
...By conservative count, more than 300 injuries resulting in almost 100 deaths have been caused by what the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says is an inherent design defect of the multi-piece rims...
...With the NHTSA investigation at a standstill, the number of legal claims is climbing in Kansas City—and the accidents on the road and in the shop continue...
...Utah officials were persuaded not to take any drastic action, but the U.S...
...Eleven years after its initial investigation and rulemaking began, NHTSA has pending another investigation and another rulemaking proceeding...
...The wheel rim massacre has become a dead issue...
...Even without hard evidence that payoffs were made, the papers amassed in Kansas City are enough to paint a damning picture of manufacturers more concerned with avoiding liability than with preventing lethal accidents...
...The damage settlements, however large, will be meager compensation for the lives lost and the injuries inflicted...
...OSHA adopted the safety standard last year...
...The current investigation, to determine whether multi-piece rims should be recalled, began in 1978, but the engineering analysis, the first step of the process, is not yet finished...
...Then there was the manufacturers' 1975 decision to push the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to adopt a safety standard, largely as a means of transferring liability to tire shops, service stations, and other small businesses...
...And they have commissioned another chart they say shows that substituting the single-piece rims would cost $136 million for every life saved...
...Lloyd Terrell's skull was fractured, leaving him paralyzed, his brain permanently damaged...
...Wheel rim tragedy Government investigations have faltered, but manufacturers face liability claims Tamar Lewin It can happen on the road or in the shop—wherever the metal ring that locks a truck tire in place separates, somehow, from the wheel rim...
...Robert Huizenga was blinded when the locking ring from a truck wheel blew off in his face...
...able metal ring that clamps the tire onto the wheel under the pressure of inflation...
...If part of the rim gives way, the tire pressure shoots the ring off with enough force to lift a car fifteen to twenty feet in the air—or to cut off a bystander's head...
...There is, for example, a May 1976 letter from Joseph Downs of Firestone to Jack Bradley of Budd Co., suggesting that they get together to decide whether to put safety warning labels on their wheel rims...
...One week later, a Goodyear executive flew from Akron, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., to give $20,000 wrapped in paper to Maurice Stans, another CREEP co-chairman...
...the manufacturers do not mention that rims have blown apart not only during tire-changing but while trucks are on the road or when air pressure is being gauged...
...Manufacturers contend when wheel rim accidents take place, it is either because of improper use or because the service workers handling the wheels are untrained...
...Hundreds of such cases from across the country have been filed in Federal court in Kansas City, Missouri, where major product liability proceedings against the truck wheel manufacturers have begun...
...Krauss, begins, "Regarding the subject of an industry committee to determine the proper approach to avoid product liability claims on multi-piece rims, which we discussed at Palm Beach, I have now received responses from . . . Kelsey Hayes" (emphasis added...
...in November 1971, the investigators reported that the manufacturers were not providing requested information...
...Indeed, the story now unfolding in Kansas City apThe companies knew the rims were unsafe pears to be a tangled tale of Government passivity and corporate bad faith, complete with allegations that the manufacturers not only chose to keep selling a product they knew was unsafe, but bought off Government investigations with Watergate-era slush fund contributions...
...NHTSA got as far as announcing a proposed ban on multi-piece rims, but then, according to an NHTSA lawyer, "President Carter said there would be no new rule-making with an adverse economic impact on the automotive industry...
...Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) decided to look into the problem and set rules of its own...
...If it can be proven that they acted in bad faith, the injured parties—whose cases will ultimately be tried separately—will be able to recover far greater damages than if the manufacturers are merely found negligent...
...Another letter the same month, from Firestone's Charles Rippey to Budd's W.R...
...More than a decade of Government safety investigation has done little to hasten the shift, however...
Vol. 45 • May 1981 • No. 5
