By Rick Schmitt
FairWarning
On the Friday before Thanksgiving 2009, Lori White, a mother of three young children, was preparing for a family trip to Bend to celebrate the holiday with relatives. She was carrying laundry upstairs in her Camarillo, California, home when her oldest child, 3-year-old Olivia, asked to watch the movie they'd bought the day before at Target.
White paused on the landing and told Olivia, who was playing by the living room window with her 2-year-old sister, Hannah, to wait just a moment. She continued upstairs, set down the laundry, picked up her infant son, Luke, and turned to go back downstairs. "She saw Olivia hanging," her husband, Craig White, said. "This was a matter of seconds."
Olivia spent the next eight days in the pediatric intensive care unit at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. Her family had Thanksgiving dinner in the hospital cafeteria. By the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Olivia could no longer breathe on her own and her doctors concluded she'd suffered too much brain damage. Olivia was taken off life support and died that day in her parents' arms.
Window cord blinds have been killing American children for decades. As far back as 1981, the
identified window blind cords as a cause of strangulation deaths among children under 5.
According to data compiled by the CPSC, at least 332 children, most of them under the age of two, have been fatally strangled by window cords over the last 30 years. Another 165 have been injured, including some who suffered permanent brain damage or quadriplegia requiring lifelong care and therapy, according to the nonprofit group Parents for Window Blind Safety.
The fatalities have included children strangled in the presence of a playmate or sibling, with a parent or caregiver footsteps away. Cords make for a chillingly quick and silent death. Victims are unable to cry out for help -- they lose consciousness in 15 seconds, and can be brain dead in a minute or two.
The CPSC began working with industry in the 1980s to develop safety measures to stem the rising toll. Yet officials have scant progress to show for their efforts, with children continuing to die at a rate of almost one a month.
The regulatory stalemate highlights weaknesses in the legal mandate of the CPSC to protect consumers - and shows how the window-covering industry has exploited that regime to keep agency officials at bay.
Consumer groups have proposed a solution: Ban new blinds with cords if the cords can't be kept away from children.
Over the years, the industry has staved off agency action with what critics say are a patchwork of voluntary fixes that have provided only an illusion of safety and have in some cases made the cord hazard worse.
Under the law, the CPSC is required to defer to industries that are developing standards voluntarily to fix products that harm consumers. The theory is that the agency has neither the time nor the resources to oversee the vast array of products subject to its jurisdiction - and that manufacturers have a strong incentive to ensure that their products are safe.
In reality, some industries have used the system to put off regulatory action for years while dangerous products maim and kill. The CPSC has the power to impose mandatory rules when it thinks the voluntary standards are inadequate. Critics say the time for such action with window blinds passed long ago, and that the agency has failed the public by leaving the industry to its own devices.
"How many years of professional courtesy should the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission extend to the window coverings industry before abandoning the voluntary standards process?" asked Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies, a Massachusetts-based research and advocacy firm.
In an interview with FairWarning, Elliot Kaye, the CPSC's chairman, acknowledged that the window blind problem is "probably unprecedented," considering the lengthy delay in regulatory action, the vulnerable population and the continuing deaths.
He added that the issue is among his highest priorities, and while he may be open to a new and tougher voluntary standard, the case for a mandatory rule has become compelling. "I would feel like a failure ... if we didn't find a solution," Kaye said.
In interviews and regulatory filings, industry officials say they have acted responsibly, and that changes in voluntary standards and technological advances have made new window blinds safer than ever. While it introduced cordless blinds in the 1990s, the industry says many types of blinds cannot operate without cords, and that a ban on corded products would force it to drop many popular styles.
Industry officials blame the safety problems largely on consumers who install or maintain their blinds improperly and on parents who don't do enough to keep their children out of harm's way. "The best way to bring about this change sooner is through consumer education, not through a mandatory standard that unfairly burdens industry and has a detrimental impact on the needs of numerous consumers," the Window Covering Manufacturers Association, an industry trade group, said in a filing with the CPSC.
"We have worked very cooperatively with CPSC over the many years," added Ralph Vasami, the executive director of the WCMA and a group vice president of Kellen Company, a New York-based public relations and association management firm.
New regulations could hurt the industry's bottom line. Corded blinds account for an estimated 75 percent of the industry's roughly $2 billion in annual sales in the U.S. The CPSC estimates that making cordless products exclusively could drive up the industry's manufacturing costs as much as $619 million a year, or about $5.50 per wall covering, although much or all of that added expense could be passed along to consumers.
The industry is dominated in the U.S. by three companies: the Dutch concern Hunter Douglas NV; Springs Window Fashions, based in Middleton, Wisconsin; and Atlanta-based Newell Rubbermaid.
Parents have channeled their grief and anger into political action. Linda Kaiser, a St. Louis mom who founded Parents for Window Blind Safety after her daughter Cheyenne was killed in her crib in 2002, has led the charge for safer products. In the absence of federal help, other parents have fought for window-blind safety measures in state legislatures. Maryland and Washington have enacted laws restricting the installation of corded blinds in day-care centers.
In California, where at least 75 children have been killed or injured by window blind cords, Assembly Member Susan Talamantes-Eggman, D-Stockton, recently introduced a bill that would prohibit the sale of many types of corded window coverings. It also would require others to have safety devices that make the cords inaccessible. The fatalities in California, more than twice the death toll in any other state, have spanned decades.
The window blinds issue, critics say, is emblematic of why the CPSC's voluntary standard process needs to be reformed. A Government Accountability Office report in 2014 singled out the "prolonged" standard-setting in window blinds as evidence that current laws and regulations may be hurting the agency's ability to attack new consumer safety risks.
"The process works when industry really wants to solve the problem," said Pamela Gilbert, a Washington lawyer and former executive director of the CPSC.
Gilbert says that has not been the case with window blinds. "The industry has thought from the beginning that this is a parental supervision thing," she said. Gilbert added that the industry position has been, "We are going to have cords. You have cords in blinds just like you have engines in cars. Parents should keep kids out of roads and out of window blinds. It is not our problem."
The deadly threat posed by window blind cords was a revelation to the Whites, the parents in California, who in 2012 relocated to Bend for what Craig White called "a clean start." He said their Camarillo home was a rental with already-installed vinyl blinds with nylon looped cords; when they moved in, it never occurred to them that the window blind cords might be a hazard. "People don't realize that it takes just a split second," he said. "She weighed 52 pounds - why didn't (the blinds) fall down? Why didn't something break? ... There's got to be a way to fix it."
Becky Darko, 31, wasn't even born when the CPSC started looking into the cord hazard. But she remembers the blood-curdling scream of her husband in 2010 when he found their daughter Daytona, 3, hanging by the neck in the window cords of an upstairs bedroom in their Great Falls, Montana, home.
Darko also remembers a manager of their public housing complex telling her that it was "a freak accident" and would not happen again. But this January another toddler strangled to death in window cords in the same complex. "They pretty much put the blame on us ... and did not care," Darko said. "Now I feel like my daughter passed away for no reason."
Last October, in a move reflecting regulators' frustration with voluntary standards, the CPSC, led by Kaye, voted unanimously to issue a notice that could lead to a mandatory federal rule. The agency is seeking public comment until June 1 about the merits of a window-covering rule and the dangers cords pose. It likely would take several years, however, for any mandatory rule to go into effect.
In his interview with FairWarning, Kaye said the industry has had more than enough time to develop safe alternatives. He recalls the day in March 2014, when he was nominated by President Obama to lead the agency. That same day news broke of a 2-year-old boy in Maryland who died entangled in the cord of a "child safe" window shade -- one of four children in a three-week span to be killed by window covering cords. "As a parent ... something clicked inside of me," Kaye said. "I just felt this can't go on anymore."
This story also published by FairWarning, a nonprofit news organization based in Los Angeles that focuses on public health, safety and environmental issues.
-- Amy Wang of The Oregonian/OregonLive staff contributed to this story.