She can barely speak, but Christy McKinney would like to warn nearly a million people still driving on recalled Firestone tires.
She lies nearly motionless in a downtown Chicago hospital, paralyzed from the neck down. She was injured Aug. 11, when a Firestone tire on her boyfriend’s black Ford Explorer blew apart, causing the vehicle to roll over and catapulting her onto a grassy highway shoulder, according to a lawsuit she has filed against the company.
With tubes extending from her body and a halo brace at her neck, McKinney, 21, is able to whisper faintly, her lips hardly moving and the sounds almost inaudible because of a surgical opening in her trachea.
“Change them before it’s too late and you end up like me,” she said.
McKinney’s accident near Ft. Smith, Ark., happened two days after Firestone announced a recall of 6.5 million tires linked at the time to 21 deaths. Federal safety investigators now say at least 101 deaths and 400 injuries may have been caused by the tires.
But seven weeks after the callback, only about half the tires have been replaced. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, most of them owners of Ford Explorers, are driving around on tires they have been warned could kill them.
Despite the recall, Firestone officials stress that billions of miles have been driven on the tires, and the chance that an individual driver will experience a tire failure–while dramatically higher than the norm–is statistically tiny.
Many drivers are apparently either satisfied with those assurances or willing to take their chances.
But those who have tried to have the tires replaced are finding it no simple matter. Backlog orders stretch for weeks and even months. Drivers in the Midwest, along the Eastern seaboard and in the Far West appear to have the longest delays. Dealers in those areas say they are being pushed to the back of the line.
Firestone has encouraged customers to find comparable replacement tires elsewhere, even from its competitors. The company will reimburse up to $400 for a set of four tires. But drivers are finding even those tires in short supply.
Until Friday, Robyn Cammack, a real estate agent in the northern Wisconsin town of Hayward, was waiting her turn. Her hometown Ford outlet doesn’t have the tires in stock and can’t tell her when it will.
Cammack became increasingly nervous as the headlines continued and the numbers climbed. And the clients she shuttled from site to site in her Explorer were clearly uneasy, she said. Pressed to explain why she was still driving on the tires, Cammack said she would begin phoning independent dealers in her region until she finds one with the tires in stock.
“I can’t be playing with the lives of people in my car because of a defect,” she said.
Firestone officials say they have boosted production and are making replacement tires as fast as they can. Once consumers contact their dealers, their average wait for new tires is about three weeks, the company says.
But many customers have waited much longer than that, and their dealers are telling them the wait will be measured in months rather than weeks.
The recalled tires are known to fail most frequently under high-heat conditions, and tire owners in the Frost Belt report being told by their dealers that replacements are hard to come by because Firestone has been sending the bulk of the available new tires to Sun Belt states.
“Firestone is playing Russian roulette with the people of this country,” said Gary Richardson, an Oklahoma attorney representing McKinney and two others injured in Firestone accidents.
Firestone denies it’s playing regional favorites, but anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. At a Firestone Tire & Auto outside Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., a clerk reported cheerfully that the dealership has “been caught up for over a week.”
There’s no waiting list, tires are in stock, and “there’s not a problem at all,” the clerk said.
A random check of a half-dozen Chicago-area dealers found waiting lists of up to 500 customers, and expectations that the process could take several months.
The backlog may be somewhat exaggerated. To improve their odds, “we advise people to get on as many waiting lists as possible,” said a clerk at one Firestone outlet on the North Side, who declined to provide his name.
Regina Kaufman says her 1998 Mercury Mountaineer is number 421 in line for replacement tires from her Lake Zurich Firestone tire dealer.
“I’m just waiting,” said Kaufman, “trying not to drive too much because I know that anything can happen to those tires.”
Firestone isn’t advising owners of the recalled tires to park their vehicles until they get replacements. The company has simply told them to bring their tires in as soon as possible.
“We understand that people have concerns,” said a spokeswoman for the Nashville, Tenn., company. In view of the relative rarity of failures, she said, the company feels the decision to drive or not to drive should be a matter of “personal choice.”
But the people stuck with that choice are unhappy. Many are confused. Many said they were unaware they could buy the tires themselves and seek reimbursement, and some who were aware said they could not afford it.
The American Automobile Association, however, recommends that drivers buy the tires themselves if at all possible, rather than waiting for Firestone to catch up.
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The situation is dangerous because the precise flaw in the failed tires has yet to be identified, said Mantill Williams, the AAA’s director of public affairs in Washington.
“You can even have a professional look at these tires and they could look fine, but without knowing what the problem is you’re still at risk,” he said. “It’s best to get them replaced by whoever has them.”
After waiting for weeks for tires from her Ford dealer, Tammie Foster decided to do just that. The Parma, Ohio, resident heard about the recall in early August, but didn’t call her Ford dealer until Aug. 22.
“Maybe it was just laziness on my part … I just didn’t get around to it,” said Foster, who works as a customer service representative for a metal-stamping company.
Foster learned that replacement tires for her 1999 Ford Ranger not only weren’t in stock, but that nobody seemed to know when they would be. She called several more times in the next couple weeks but made no progress. In the meantime, she curtailed non-essential driving.
“It was always in the back of my mind that something could happen,” she said.
On Sept. 20, she finally gave in. She downloaded the forms from Firestone’s recall-information site on the Internet, paid $502 for a set of tires made by Firestone rival Dunlop, and now is waiting for a reimbursement check from Firestone.
“They said it will take two weeks, but we’ll see,” she said. “At least I can drive in peace now.”
Consumers who own recalled tires but can’t get them replaced quickly should make sure the tires are properly inflated, choose routes that keep them off interstates, avoid overloading their vehicles and “of course, wear your seatbelts,” Williams said.
Firestone officials said they are replacing about 70,000 tires a day, counting tires recovered through the reimbursement program, but they decline to project when they expect to finish the recall.
Officially, the company’s recall covers about 6.5 million tires, primarily 15-inch models of Firestone’s ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT brand tires produced at its plant in Decatur.
When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a “consumer advisory” spelling out concerns about 1.4 million more tires in the same models, Firestone didn’t expand the recall. But it did agree to replace those tires if people bring them in.
Friday, federal safety regulators said they were looking into 169 complaints about Firestone’s Steeltex R4S and A/T truck tires, which may be linked to two fatalities and 12 injuries.
Some drivers waiting on replacement tires feel they have no choice but to park their cars.
“Basically, we take a lot of public transportation and walk a lot,” said Kevin Clark, a former Chicago-area resident who moved to San Francisco last year.
The Bay Area dealer Clark contacted when he learned of the recall told him “they didn’t have any replacements and the wait would be four months.” He’s thinking of buying another maker’s tires and then collecting from Firestone, but worries the company might not be able to repay him, at least anytime soon.
For now, he and his wife are trying to get along without their 1991 Explorer, particularly for the sake of their 4-month-old son.
“He’s the most precious thing we have in the world, and we are not about to put him in danger by driving with him in that car,” Clark said.
McKinney, a single mother, lies in a hospital bed with a snapshot of her 9-month-old son Conner hanging near the maze of tubes that keeps her going. On a hot August afternoon, McKinney was driving on Interstate Highway 40 outside Ft. Smith, Ark., with Conner strapped into a car seat behind her.
Witnesses said the tread on the left rear tire literally fell apart; the Explorer flipped twice and stopped in a cloud of dust.
McKinney was found lying on the shoulder, unable to move. Conner was wedged between an airbag and the front passenger seat.
Conner suffered head injuries but is recovering, family members said. But McKinney, being treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, is a quadriplegic.
As bills mount, McKinney passes her days listening to audiotapes of the New Testament. She especially likes the verses about miracles.
McKinney’s family is suing Firestone and Ford–one of dozens of legal actions filed against the company in recent weeks. Meanwhile, when she sees them in parking lots, McKinney’s mother, Sherri, confronts Ford Explorer owners, begging them to change their tires.
“Some people just laugh at me,” she said. “They think it can’t happen to them. I hope they don’t find out the way we did.”