Older child seats can be dangerous

Published 11:25 pm Thursday, September 13, 2007

John Oxendine says some car seats can be more dangerous for the children they are supposed to protect than if nothing was being used.

Oxendine, the state insurance commissioner, will be in Dalton on Saturday with actor Erik Estrada for a free child safety seat inspection and installation fair at the Dalton Kmart at 1308 W. Walnut Ave. The event will run from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

“Across America tens of thousands of children are needlessly hurt and killed in automobile accidents that could have been stopped with a proper car seat, and that’s what we’re trying to stop are those senseless serious injuries and deaths,” Oxendine said.

The fairs began a year ago with events in Atlanta and Savannah. This year the fairs are being held in Dalton, Columbus and Macon.

“Car seats are one of the best ways to save our young children,” Oxendine said. “So many people don’t understand how to use car seats, they’re very confusing, they’re made by different manufacturers.

“The other problem is people will use old car seats. They use hand-me-down car seats, they get car seats from friends and neighbors, buy them from second-hand stores. And generally those car seats don’t meet the current modern safety standards … so those older car seats turn out to be very dangerous. They can be more dangerous than if you had nothing.”

So Oxendine wants people with children to come out to Saturday’s fair.

“We’re going to check your car seat and make sure you’ve installed it properly,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that car seat is properly matched with your child. Sometimes people buy the car seat when the child is little and if the child gets bigger the child has outgrown the car seat. And a child that’s too big for a car seat is in an extremely dangerous situation.”

Oxendine says if something’s not right, “if we can fix it simply by reinstalling it, we’ll do that.”

But what makes this fair different from many car seat events, Oxendine said, is “if that seat is old, if it doesn’t meet safety standards, and that seat is the wrong size for that child, instead of telling you and then making you go and spend a couple of hundred dollars for a new seat … we take your car seat away, we remove it from your car, and we get a brand new one out of the box that’s right for that child.”

Some 310 car seats were given away last year at the fairs in Atlanta and Savannah. If anyone is in line when Saturday’s event is shut down, a voucher will be available.

“We want as many people to come out there as can,” Oxendine said. “We’re not going to run out of car seats.”

Oxendine was looking for a partner for the safety effort when he came across 21st Century Insurance, a company headquartered in California that had recently moved into Georgia.

The company provides the seats, “and also a lot of their employees,” Oxendine said. “So they’re bringing manpower and also they’re bringing the spokesman for these events.”

That spokesman is Estrada, who starred in “CHiP’s,” the television show based on the California Highway Patrol, and who recently starred in the reality TV show “Armed and Famous” on CBS.

“It really does help,” Oxendine said of Estrada’s participation, adding, “People sometimes make it hard to help them. So by having a celebrity come out, that really helps get people out there.”

Oxendine said Estrada “is an ideal person because his entire career has been dealing with safety, both on the screen and dealing with road safety off the screen. He’s very much associated with highway safety. Everybody remembers ’CHiP’s’ and that’s why we have him as the spokesman for the program.”

Estrada will greet families and sign autographs.

Children must accompany their parent or guardian in the vehicle so that the car seats can be fitted properly.

Other sponsors are the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety and the Georgia Department of Public Safety.