Each year, an estimated 19,900 people go to the emergency room for injuries related to furniture tip-overs, and between 2000 and 2019, 351 people died from tip-overs involving furniture, according to a recent report from the CPSC.
The solution often proposed by furniture manufacturers is that consumers should anchor their furniture to the wall. But CR’s ongoing investigation, as well as McGee’s recent experience, shows that anchors are not a sufficient fix. Some renters aren’t allowed to make holes in the wall for anchors due to the terms of their lease, and many other people don’t know that anchors are needed to keep furniture from tipping over. For example, 41 percent of Americans said that they did not anchor their furniture because it seemed stable, according to a CR nationally representative survey of 1,502 U.S. adults done in 2018.
There are also many people who don’t have the skill to install wall anchors, and even for those people who do have the skill, like McGee, anchors don’t always hold. For instance, McGee anchored the nightstand, which was part of a juvenile bedroom set, with a metal anchor kit that she felt would be stronger than the plastic zip tie anchor that came with the nightstand. And because the back of the nightstand was made of particle board, she attached the anchor to the thicker top lip of the nightstand. But the anchor detached from the nightstand when it fell.
“I followed the directions of the anchor kit as best I could and made a reasonable judgment call about where to place the anchor on the furniture,” McGee says. “But this just really makes me question the whole anchor kit process even more. And I can’t stop thinking, ‘when can I stop worrying about a piece of furniture falling on my child again? When can we feel safe?’”
Ashley Furniture did not respond to CR’s request for comment but an employee did respond to McGee when she reported the incident to the company. The response McGee received stated that she had not used the anchor kit that was included with the nightstand and that she had installed the anchors differently than the instructions. Ashley also did not respond to CR’s question about whether the company had tested the nightstand to see if it complies with the voluntary stability standard for dressers, which currently exempts nightstands.
CR has also learned of circumstances where anchors have failed even when consumers used ones that came with the product. That was the case, captured on a baby monitor, when an anchored Ikea bookshelf tipped over onto twin toddlers who were spared from harm due to the way the bookshelf fell.
“We can’t rely on anchors,” says Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids In Danger. “Had the furniture not tipped, the anchors would not have been tested and pulled out—so clearly, we need to develop more stable furniture that won’t tip under the weight of toddlers or 3-year-olds.”
The issue, echoes Knight, is not the anchors, but that dressers are not always built to be stable enough to resist tipping over when a child climbs or pulls on them. “There’s no way to tell if a dresser is more or less stable just by looking at it,” she says. “It’s critical to require strong safety testing before furniture is sold, and that should include tests accounting for real-world scenarios, such as when multiple drawers are open or when a child is pulling or climbing on a dresser.”
McGee puts it simply: “Anchoring is a Band-Aid to the real problem,” she says. “All these people told me after Ted died that I should’ve anchored my furniture, and guess what? I listened and learned my lesson, and this second tip-over still happened.”
"furniture" - Google News
March 18, 2021 at 04:45AM
https://ift.tt/38Nwvvy
Two Tip-Overs in One Week Highlight Continued Threat of Unstable Furniture - ConsumerReports.org
"furniture" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YLhHcA
No comments:
Post a Comment