Home
Welcome!
The Arizona Fire and Burn Educators Association is proud to welcome you to our website. We hope this will provide a resource for educators and families to find injury prevention materials to help make our communities safer. Be sure to check out the calendar which highlights members’ activities, as well as training opportunities at the National Fire Academy and closer to home in the Southwest.
Four Drownings in Canals in a Year Draws Safety Advocates’ Attention
On April 6, the Maricopa County area lost its fourth child to drowning in a canal. This artificial waterway is vital to the survival of our Valley cities and many are being landscaped and presented as recreational areas. However, it is important to understand these waters are not a place for children to play and need to be taken seriously by all of Arizona’s residents.
Recently, the Valleywide Fire PIO Nework partnered with the Drowning Prevention Coalition of Arizona to host a press event to raise awareness of the danger of these Arizona water hazards. At the event, the group provided safety tips and highlighted speakers who have been personally touched by tragedies in these waterways.
For a sample of the coverage by Channel 15, click here.
New Study: Less than a quarter of vehicles surveyed have easy-to-use LATCH
A new study shows that many automakers aren’t paying attention to the key factors that make LATCH work. Only 21 of the 98 top-selling 2010-11 model passenger vehicles evaluated have LATCH designs that are easy to use. This is the main finding of joint research conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI).
The researchers scrutinized LATCH hardware and rear seat designs in a range of passenger vehicles to determine the key vehicle characteristics that would help LATCH be used correctly. They identified three factors associated with correct lower anchor use: depth, clearance and force.
- Depth: Lower anchors should be located no more than 3/4 inch deep in the seat bight and should be easy to see.
- Clearance: Nothing should obstruct access to the anchors. Safety belt buckles and other hardware plus the foam, cloth or leather material of the seats themselves shouldn’t get in the way of attaching child seat connectors. There should be enough room around the anchors to approach them at an angle, as well as straight-on. This makes it easier to hook or snap on connectors and also tighten LATCH straps. In the study, a clearance angle of at least 54 degrees was associated with easier installation.
- Force: Parents should be able to install child restraints using less than 40 pounds of force. Some systems require lots of effort to properly attach child seat hardware with lower anchors, in part because they are deep in the seat bight or surrounded by interfering parts of the vehicle seat.
All three factors are related and are good predictors of how well people are able to correctly install child restraints. Vehicles meeting the criteria were 19 times as likely to have lower anchors used correctly by the volunteers compared with vehicles that don’t meet any of the criteria.
Overall, parents and caregivers correctly installed seats with lower anchors and top tethers to get a tight, secure fit at the right angle in just 13 percent of the cases.
