Reasons to buckle up

Remembering to wear a seat belt could be crucial to surviving an accident.

From staff

The adult driver and infant ejected from the truck cab in the parking lot of the Lancaster Wal-Mart were just cloth-covered dummies. If they had been real people, the wreck would have killed or seriously injured them.

This was part of a traveling simulation staged by the S.C. Highway Patrol. The truck cab was on a platform where a trooper could mechanically manipulate it to mimic the effect of a highway rollover accident.

The conditions are not exact. Lance Cpl. Jeff Gaskin, who ran the simulation, noted that the truck cab was flipping at a speed of only about 15 mph, the speed many cars cruise through a parking lot.

A real rollover at higher speeds can produce much more gruesome results. The simulation and the lecture from Gaskin have one distinct message: Wear your seat belt.

South Carolina finally passed a seat belt law with teeth in 2005. In the past, troopers could cite people not wearing seat belts only after stopping them for another violation. Troopers now can pull over cars in which drivers or passengers are unbuckled as a stand-alone violation.

That has helped increase the percentage of South Carolina drivers who regularly wear seat belts. Nonetheless, some still fail to buckle up.

The recent deaths of two young people in car accidents, one a student at Winthrop University, the other a student at Fort Mill's Nation Ford High School, offer a tragic footnote. Neither victim was wearing a seat belt.

The Herald now offers an online fatal crash database at heraldonline.com/fatalcrash. The dry statistics tell the same story as the simulator: 17 of the 45 people who died this year in York, Chester and Lancaster county traffic accidents � nearly 40 percent � were not wearing seat belts.

Failure to buckle up ranks among the three factors most common in fatal crashes, along with speeding and driving under the influence. Those factors are involved in more than half the fatal crashes in the three-county area.

Some factors that lead to accidents are beyond the control of drivers � weather conditions, car malfunctions, bad roads, drunk or inattentive drivers. But one thing we can control, which has a significant bearing on whether or not we survive a wreck, is the decision to buckle our seat belts.

As thousands of drivers will attest, buckling up can become like second nature, something we automatically do each time we get into a car. And not using seat belts can come to seem unnatural.

To those who don't routinely wear seat belts, give it a try. It might be a matter of life or death.