By STEPHEN POWER
Staff Reporter of THE
WALL STREET
JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- Federal auto-safety regulators reported 26 more deaths from traffic accidents involving Firestone tires, bringing to 174 the total number of fatalities associated with the tires coming to light since last summer's massive tire recall.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that since its last update in December, it has received 1,700 new complaints alleging tread separations, blowouts and other problems involving Firestone tires. Nineteen of the new deaths were reported by Safetyforum.com, an Arlington, Va., research group that is working with trial lawyers suing Bridgestone/Firestone Inc., which manufactured the tires, and Ford Motor Co. on behalf of accident victims. Bridgestone/Firestone is a unit of Japan's Bridgestone Corp. Most of the accidents involved Ford's popular Explorer sport-utility vehicle, which carried Firestone tires as original equipment.
None of the deaths in the latest update occurred since last August's recall of 6.5 million ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT Tires. Safetyforum.com spokesman Ralph Hoar said his group learned about the additional deaths by combing through more than 280 personal-injury lawsuits in the U.S. involving Firestone tire failures.
"We know that we have not identified all of the lawsuits that should be included in our database," Mr. Hoar said. "This raises the serious concern that some deaths and injuries are still uncounted. Firestone tire failures and resulting rollovers are likely to be a more serious problem than we know."
Altogether, the NHTSA has collected 6,000 complaints and reports of more than 700 injuries in its investigation of Firestone tires. It is trying to determine if the company's recall should include other models.
Last week, an outside expert hired by Bridgestone/Firestone backed the company's findings that there is no single cause for its tire failures. But the expert, Sanjay Govindjee, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, also singled out vehicle weight as a key factor in belt separations and said data show a similar rate of complaints between certain tires that were recalled and some that weren't.
Bridgestone/Firestone spokeswoman Christine Karbowiak said her company takes all complaints seriously and is working with the NHTSA to develop a better system for reporting complaints. But she questioned the accuracy of the agency's database, noting that 1,000 of the new complaints came from a single plaintiffs attorney. "I think that points up the fact that all the complaints need to be verified," she said. NHTSA officials said they continually review the database to weed out duplicate reports and make corrections.