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A bill that would have encouraged ATV safety by setting age and passenger limits and requiring passengers to wear helmets died in Mississippi’s last legislative session. Now another child is dead and two others injured following an ATV accident in the Hebron Community, located about halfway between Jackson and Hattiesburg in the south-central portion of state.
According to the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recently published all-terrain vehicle data “appears to indicate that the numbers of deaths and injuries caused by ATVs declined in 2008 as compared to 2007.”
January was a deadly month across North America for teenagers riding all-terrain vehicles. ATV accidents are responsible for hundreds of deaths and thousands of serious injuries each year. Especially alarming is the growing number of accidents involving children and teenagers, who account for a third of all injuries and fatalities linked to ATV crashes.
City, county, and state officials are banding together in many parts of the country to offer all-terrain-vehicle awareness and safety events. The need for more ATV safety instruction and awareness events increases as the number of people who become seriously injured or killed in rollovers and other ATV accidents continues to grow.
A 13-year old South Carolina boy died last Sunday when the all-terrain vehicle he was driving rolled over and landed on top of him. According to reports by South Carolina CBS affiliate WBTW, Benjamin “Shane” Byers, a resident of Johnsonville, SC, was rushed to Lake City Hospital but was pronounced dead at 2:53 p.m., approximately one hour after the accident occurred.
A Mississippi coroner has become a strong advocate of tougher laws governing the operation of all-terrain vehicles because of the horrific injuries she has seen on the job. Carolyn Gillentine-Green, the Coroner of Lee County, Mississippi, told Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger that she supported any measures that would improve ATV safety in her state. “I’m a proponent for anything to make it safer,” Gillentine-Green told the paper.
As the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) pushes for legislation that would ban young children from riding all-terrain vehicles in the Canadian province, another boy has been severely injured in an ATV accident. According to The Observer of Sarnia, Ontario, an 11-year-old boy from Warwick Township, located just northeast of Detroit and Windsor, was driving an ATV unsupervised on private property when the accident occurred.
All-terrain vehicle accidents are common in Canada, where the vehicles have become a way of life for so many people living in the country’s vast stretches of rural land and wilderness. Unfortunately, Canada’s youngest citizens account for a significant percent of the injuries and deaths resulting from ATV rollovers and collisions – a grim statistic that has prompted the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) to push for new legislation that would help protect many Ontario children from being injured or killed on ATVs.
As in rural parts of the United States, all-terrain vehicles in rural Canada are becoming a way of life. Unhindered by wild, rugged landscapes, ATVs for many seem like the perfect choice for hunting, trapping, farming, or just exploring and having fun trail blazing and off-roading. However, as the ATVs grow in popularity, so do the number of traumatic injuries reported by many hospitals. Sudbury Regional Hospital in northern Ontario, for instance, reports an explosion of ATV-related trauma since 2007.
ACCORDING TO A PRESS RELEASE PUBLISHED ON LIEFF CABRASER YAMAHA RHINO WEBSITE:
Earlier this week we featured J.T. Crow, a 9-year-old boy who died when the Yamaha Rhino he was a passenger in rolled onto its side, throwing him from the ATV and pinning him underneath its unpadded roll cage. Since the accident, which occurred in June 2007, J.T.’s mother, Heidi Crow, embarked on a mission to “help save others from a tragic fate like J.T.’s.”
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