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- Title
Forensic Engineering Analysis of Riding Lawnmower Child Backover Blade Contact Accidents.
- Authors
Reed, E. Smith
- Abstract
Since the mid 1960s, the popularity and use of riding lawnmowers and lawn & garden tractors in the United States have grown steadily. With the growing popularity of these machines has also come increased numbers of riding mower-related accidents, including children being backed over or run over and injured by the mower's spinning blades. Reconstructing such child backover or runover blade contact accidents requires the forensic engineer to pay specific attention to certain factors that are unique to such incidents. In child backover blade contact accidents, because the victim is not often more than 47" tall, and because the victim's injuries progress (don't happen all at once) as the mower backs over him/her, in the reconstruction of such accidents, every inch of relative movement, and every fraction of a second of blade contact counts. Adding to this need to focus on details is the need to consider the events in light of the alternative design that addresses such accidents, the design feature commonly known as No-Mow-In-Reverse. NMIR is a feature that automatically shuts the mower blades off when the riding mower/tractor is in reverse. Because with NMIR-equipped machines the blades, when shut off, don't stop instantly (they coast to a stop), as the mower backs up, the blades, as they spin toward a stop, become progressively less and less dangerous. Only with careful accident reconstruction analysis can it be determined whether or not NMIR would have made a difference in the child's resulting injury. While this paper provides background information about child backover blade contact accidents, and provides information about No-Mow-In-Reverse, the primary purpose is to offer a tool that has been found to be helpful and effective in organizing, analyzing and displaying information, time-related events and travel distance data in off-road slow-moving-event accidents, accidents such as child backover blade contact accidents, so that a reasoned reconstruction of the accident can be developed, a range of assumptions can be studied, and "what if" questions can be isolated and compared - all in a format understandable to the layperson.
- Subjects
FORENSIC engineering; INVESTIGATION of work-related injuries; RIDING lawn mowers; LAWN mowers -- Design &; construction; GARDEN tractors
- Publication
Journal of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers, 2007, Vol 24, Issue 1, p101
- ISSN
2379-3244
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.51501/jotnafe.v24i1.675