http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1173470124263420.xml&coll=7Dying to ride full-size ATVs An epidemic of child deaths and injuries on all-terrain vehicles should persuade Oregon lawmakers to restrict young riders
Sunday, March 11, 2007
A dult all-terrain vehicles are dangerous for kids. The ATV industry admits it. Emergency room doctors know it. More than two dozen recent child deaths and scores of serious injuries in Oregon prove it.
Yet Oregon law still allows kids to operate the largest, most powerful ATVs. It also permits children, of any age, to legally ride the four-wheel machines.
That's just not safe. Look at the facts on the ground: ATV and off-road motorcycle accidents in Oregon have exploded by 76 percent in recent years, according to a study led by Dr. Richard Mullins, chief of trauma/critical care at Oregon Health & Science University Hospital. The study found that kids younger than 15 suffer about 20 percent of off-road injuries.
The state Health Division reports that 25 children died in Oregon ATV accidents during the six years beginning in 1999, with eight kids killed in 2005 alone. The Mullins study found that half of injured riders treated at OHSU suffered head, neck or face injuries, and the number of patients requiring spine operations has increased seven-fold.
The ATV industry and its most vocal supporters insist that there's nothing to see here, that legislators should just move on, that voluntary training and education, and parental supervision, are sufficient.
But it's not, and doctors see the bloody, broken evidence in their emergency rooms. Though the government can or should do little in response to ATV accidents involving adults, Oregon, other states and Congress should pass laws limiting ATV use by children.
By now, it is painfully clear that children under the age of 16 do not belong on adult-sized ATVs that can weigh 600 pounds and top speeds of 60 mph.
Several ATV safety bills are now idling in the Oregon Legislature; the most important would prohibit children under the age of 16 from operating adult-size ATVs and ban kids under the age of 8 from riding on any of the machines. The bill is hardly radical: It exempts off-road motorcycles and, in terms of children 8 and older, would codify in law what the ATV industry itself generally recommends. Yet some ATV riders are bitterly criticizing not just the bill but also its proponents.
Foes have threatened to recall one of the bill's co-sponsors, Sen. Alan Bates, D-Ashland. An Oregon mother who backs the bill, Sue DeLoretto-Rabe, whose son, Kyle, died in an ATV accident in 2002, has received cruel, unsigned e-mails that attack her support for restrictions and blame her for her son's death.
Of course, those few cold voices don't speak for the vast majority of parents who enjoy riding ATVs with their children, do it safely and oppose any interference with their family traditions. That's an understandable position, but it does not begin to address the epidemic of child death and injury on adult ATVs.
The critics also complain that ATVs are being singled out for regulation. In fact, ATVs are a notable exception to existing laws that set reasonable age limits to drive automobiles, motorboats and personal watercraft such as Jet Skis.
The deaths and awful injuries suffered by children can't be ignored any longer, or met with more vague promises of better "education." Look at the Oregon Health Division's brief summaries of just three of the more than two dozen Oregon child deaths:
"Age 6: Child was home on farm riding adult-sized . . . ATV (est. 600 pounds). Unsupervised, rollover."
"Age 12: One of three passengers on ATV riding on gravel country road. Vehicle rollover on (adult-sized ATV). Was 5 feet tall, 110 pounds."
"Age 13: Single passenger riding on adult-size (ATV) at sand dunes in Florence on family vacation. . . . Was 5 feet 1 inches tall, 90 pounds."
These tragic accidents have one thing in common: Children thrown from adult-sized ATVs.
Under the narrow law now before the Legislature, kids ages 8 to 16 would be allowed to ride ATVs, but restricted to safer, less powerful youth models. The law wouldn't prevent all ATV accidents. It wouldn't stop family ATV traditions.
But it would save young lives.
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