Adding to the possibly unending list of variables about wheelchair tipovers – the second most-common incident scenario in public transportation in most of its sectors – is a common response by drivers after some wheelchair user spills out of his or her chair – a scenarios that CAN NOT POSSIBLY HAPPEN if the chair’s occupant is properly secured into his or her wheelchair or scooter, and that wheelchair is properly secured to the vehicle floor – unless the “closing speed” of the vehicle and another vehicle striking it “head on” exceeds 30 mph. (This is because the securement equipment (of all types) on every public transportation vehicle is required to resist 20 g-forces – the equivalent of crashing one’s vehicle into a brick wall at 30 mph. Such forces could deform parts of the wheelchair, and it could break loose from its moorings. But I have never encountered a “closing speed” of anything like this force in any of the roughly 150 wheelchair tipovers I have been involved in as an expert witness (losing none of them, although I withdrew from a few from lack of payment).
Knowing every mode of public transportation as I do, I could not begin to estimate the number of wheelchair tipovers that occur daily in the United States. Since several million wheelchair users reside here, and many of them must travel frequently (e.g., six one-way trips a week, at minimum, just to attend dialysis treatment), a guess of 10,000 tipovers a day would not seem unreasonable. No provisions have ever been made to count them at any level above some transportation agency’s level –and few such agencies even do, lest they might be asked to surrender these figures in a discovery request. But I do not get hundreds of inquiries a day about such incidents – even while I am among the handful of experts in our nation in the operation of vehicles that carry a disproportionate number of wheelchairs: Complementary paratransit service, non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) service and special education schoolbus service. The vast majority of these tipovers occur in paratransit and NEMT service, for a handful of reasons: Most of their schedules are too tight. And unlike most schoolbus driver and management staff, many (if not most) paratransit drivers and especially NEMT drivers hate and loathe disabled passengers – particularly wheelchair users. This fact is largely because the schedules in these sectors are too tight, and securing even a garden variety manual wheelchair could take several minutes – adding even more running time to a vehicle despite many drivers committing scores of safety compromises per run just to keep their vehicles from falling even further behind. (For a quick summary of these failures – many of which likely require a few additional seconds to perform, just look at the pictures on the HomePage of safetycompromises.com. (I would not dare suggest a transportation employee actually read anything not dealing with sports or pornography, although some do keep up with the news, as hyperbolic and surreal as it has become in recent years.)
A curious phenomenon that occurs occasionally is what the driver does after one of his or her clients spills out onto the vehicle floor, or his or her chair tips over (whether that victim is attached to his or her chair or not): He or she not only picks the passenger up and repositions him or her into the wheelchair, but (a) properly secures the wheelchair to the floor hardware, and (b) properly secures the passenger into the wheelchair. The driver then proceeds onto his or her destination as though nothing at all had happened – even when the passenger is as dead as a doornail, and recognizably so by practically anyone with no experience whatsoever in the medical vehicle. The exception, of course, is the parent, guardian, sibling or son or daughter of each of these passengers, who recognize that something is not quite right immediately. While hardly in the majority of cases, it is surprising how many dead bodies are delivered to their destinations – perhaps with the driver thinking that whomever next observes the passenger may think that that he or she has simply dozed off. (Who effectively dozed off was, of course, the driver or the victim’s attendant – if not the system’s owner or the head of a public agency.)
As an expert witness, I love to find this scenario having occurred – although as a human being a really hate to see it. As an expert witness, such antics make my case easier and easier. This is because the driver – moving around “dead weight,” so to speak – has just proven that he or she knows how to secure a wheelchair user into his or her chair perfectly, just as he or she has just proven that he or she knows how to properly secure the wheelchair (or scooter) to the vehicle floor. After-the-incident, these things are still not always done correctly, since the nanosecond the driver arrives, he or she unfastens the lap and shoulder belts, and as quickly as possible, disengages the chair from its moorings in the floor. Because it can take 10 times as long to properly secure a wheelchair to the vehicle floor than it does to detach it, those discovering the dead body, or more often, someone merely mutilated or dizzy from his or her fall onto the vehicle floor, does not realize that the post-incident securement may not have been performed perfectly. But secured they were, at least sloppily.
The ADA and Cub Scout Handbook
Most people having reviewed both at one point or another recognize that the transportation sections of the ADA are longer than the Cub Scout Handbook. (I’m not sure this is true for the Boy Scout Handbook.) Regardless, only these books begin with – and even include – one of the most important principles of safety after a fall: “Do not move an accident victim.” That I know this when I was eight years old will not help you if you must face me in a wheelchair tipover case where the victim is simply dropped at his or her destination as though he or she is having a good day for someone in this condition.
Without a large-scale medical trial that will never happen in this country, and perhaps in no other countries even occupied by a significantly greater percentage of inhabitants with actual values, we can never be certain why moving wheelchair victims after such falls is so common. In some cases, it is likely that the drivers or attendants know that this stunt is dangerous (even when not given Cub Scout training, or when they are, and do not wish to risk injuring these victim’s further). But a sizable percentage of these drivers or attendants – often with the help of a passenger – know damned well that additional harm can come to an accident (or incident) victim so moved, without the expertise of a nurse or EMT, much less with the right equipment (e.g., a backboard or a stretcher) available to help accomplish this task.
In sharp contrast, these drivers and/or attendants are, instead, concerned with not getting into trouble for not securing the passenger into his or her wheelchair, or the wheelchair to the vehicle floor, in the first place. And while most instances of this masquerade I have seen could not likely have fooled me, the perpetrators who often compound the fall victim’s injuries (when this stunt does not kill him or her) apparently believe that the person first receiving this victim at the destination will not notice any difference, and think the wheelchair’s occupant arrived just fine, and whatever injured them worse, or killed them, was the result of something done or not done after this victim was dropped off.
A sad thing I expect is that this stunt often works – particularly when the first person to see the victim after the fall does not do so right away, or does not take the time to look closely at him or her upon his or her arrival. To be fair, the first person receiving such a victim may not know his or her condition that well. And plenty of badly disabled wheelchair users may not look much different that someone properly positioned and secured into a wheelchair compared to a dead body placed in one. Keep in mind, too, that the first thing a recipient does upon receiving a wheelchair victim is far more often saying “hello” than taking the individual’s pulse to see if he or she is still breathing.
Again, the likelihood of this phenomenon is unlikely to ever be studied, since checking a wheelchair user’s inert body for signs of life are not necessarily the first things one does upon receiving someone like this. Perhaps it should be. But our society’s priorities lie far from such things. And even for those doctors, nurses and EMTs often overwhelmed by more patients than they can handle in perhaps the sixth decade of what I call the U.S. Jobs Elimination Program, it may be asking a lot to suggest that the first thing they check, upon receiving a new patient in a wheelchair, is to determine whether or not he or she is still alive – especially since the driver wheeling in such a patient is going out of his or her way to act like nothing is remotely wrong beyond the general condition of the wheelchair user when he or she first took a seat in his or her chair at or before he beginning of the trip – which could also have been hours before the trip began, since a large portion of wheelchair users spend all or most of their day in their chairs.
Just one word to the wise. If you are a defendant’s attorney, and some third party receives someone dead or barely alive, just make sure that victim’s expert witness is not me. I don’t have the naïve faith in some phony inherent goodness possessed by most Americans that many of my fellow-citizens do. And as an experienced veteran of roughly 150 wheelchair tipovers, if my attorney is savvy and generous enough to allow me the flexibility to explore the case thoroughly, this trick is not working on me. At the moment of this writing, I have two clear-cut dead body delivery cases. As we elect and proceed down out accelerating national path of greed, indifference and iniquity, I expect the number of these cases to grow. I you’re a defendant’ attorney facing me in such a case, tell your carrier to dust off his or her checkbook, and to not be foolish enough to select this moment to be a cheapskate – or to over-estimate the confidence in your or your expert’s expertise.
As a society with a sizeable minority of the population barely disturbed by the shenanigans of our growing police state, we don’t experts our public transportation drivers to be recruited from the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. We hear plenty of malarkey about how an occasional victim or one of hundreds of thousands of deportees posed some threat to some over-armed, anonymous, cowardly bully. But even the suckers who believe that are rarely going to consider some weak, pale, wheelchair occupant to pose much of a threat to anyone, much less dressed and armed with military gear and the impunity to use it. The lesson is that, apart from the mainstream of our society, tread lightly with wheelchair users and treat them with an overabundance of attention, caution and care. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can fool even the average person about recognizing whether someone is dead or alive.
#wheelchairtipovers #wheelchairandpassengersecurement #transalt #postincidentprecautionsandbehavior #wheelchairaccidentsandincidents