Trooper Hammons Stresses Seat Belt Use

Trooper Stephen Hammons, Public Information Officer for State Police Troop I visited 'Mornings With Ken and Bernie' today and again stressed the importance of seat belt use.

In recent days we have had a number of news stories concerning fatal crashes where the fatality could have been avoided with seat belt use.  We asked Hammons why people weren't getting the message and he said,

So often people forget what takes place in a crash.  Commonly people think 'my car is going to get damaged and I'll be fine'.  But in every single crash there are three impacts that occur.  You have a vehicle collision where one car hits something, the human collision where your body is hitting something like the seat belt or the dashboard.  This is the most important thing, the internal collision.  Far to often we forget that our internal organs are traveling with us and have to stop also.

According to Hammons,

We've worked crashes where a victim gets out of the vehicle, talks to officers and we get word that they died an hour later at the hospital due to internal injuries.

We asked Hammons why we were reporting so many accidents and fatal accidents and he replied,

This is the time of year when there are more vehicles on the road.  More people are taking off work to travel or shop so the accident rate goes up and if people are not restrained we'll have more fatalities.

 

You can listen to the entire interview by clicking here: