Published: August 21, 2007 10:18 pm      

Fayette delegate holds seminar on ATV safety

CHARLESTON, WV — A renewed all-terrain vehicle safety push, led by a Fayette County legislator, focused on grim statistics Tuesday and a brazen disregard for an existing law that bans four-wheelers from roads with centerlines.

Even with flagrant violations, however, the informal study group was told by a Mullens Fire Department official that safety and training are more important than where the ATVs are ridden.

Delegate Margaret Staggers, D-Fayette, actually held three such lunchtime studies, buying food for those who took part out of her own pocket.

An emergency room physician, she detailed how trauma units maintain statistics on all persons brought into hospitals, including ATV victims.

Capt. Chad Cox, who also is a paramedic, suggested a single entity needs to be organized to gather and analyze statistics on four-wheeler accidents.

In current practice, such data is being kept by hospital trauma centers, the Division of Motor Vehicles and the West Virginia University Extension Service, but the information can vary as to methodology and interpretation, Cox told the lawmakers.

One single group should be designated to collate the ATV accident statistics, he said.

Cox called it “a common occurrence” to see ATV users riding without helmets and abusing manufacturer recommendations, such as riding on paved surfaces or hauling passengers.

“I’ve seen infants swaddled in one arm and a can of beer in the other hand,” he said.

West Virginia recorded 40 deaths in 2005, then soared to a nation-high 54 last year, and so far in 2007, there have been 25 fatalities involving four-wheelers, he said.

Cox reminded the study group that 94 percent of those killed died without headgear, and 16 percent of the deaths were children under 15.

“Listen to what the manufacturers say,” he said, displaying a typical label the makers affix to their products.

A key provision in that warning label is to avoid public roads or paved surfaces, he pointed out.

At the same time, Cox told Delegate Jim Morgan, D-Cabell, chair of the House Government Organization Committee, that safety and training are more important than where ATV riders cruise.

“We just need to get it all together,” Staggers said of the ATV issue in West Virginia.

Morgan indicated he intends to allow Dr. Jim Helmkamp, an ATV safety advocate at WVU who has testified in recent sessions on four-wheeler safety, to address his panel in the October interims.

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com