Amish buggies no match for cars in collisions

Two collisions that crushed horse-drawn buggies and critically injured two Amish men in Pennsylvania this month have renewed attention to the mismatch between fast, heavy metal motor vehicles and slow, lightweight wooden buggies.

Most Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities have worked diligently to make their buggies visible at night. The trouble is that new research shows that nighttime isn't the most dangerous time for buggies. Instead it's when the sun blinds drivers. Often the problem is not the buggy, but a distracted motorist.

Buggy Builders Bulletin, an Amish-produced trade journal, has tried to explain the world of modern motorists to readers with a 19th-century lifestyle.

"We have run articles about what people are doing in their vehicles," said Larry Bowman, an Amish buggy builder from Thompsonville, Ill., who formerly published the journal and remains on its advisory board.

"They have fax machines, cell phones, radios, television, and they're not paying attention to their driving. Someone driving a horse has to pay attention -- and they don't watch television. You have two worlds colliding here," he said.

Such collisions have produced brutal results. On May 5, Erven A. Byler, 22, of Hartstown, Pa., was driving his buggy along Route 358 at about 12:50 a.m., when a hit-and-run driver struck from behind. Amish buggies are designed to eject their occupants, and Byler was thrown about 50 feet. His horse was killed.

The next day state police arrested a 22-year-old man who was charged with leaving the scene of a crash involving serious bodily injury and driving on a suspended license. Byler remains in critical condition in a Youngstown, Ohio hospital.

He was joined in the intensive care unit five days later by Benjamin Kempf, 29, of Clarks Mills, Pa. Kempf was driving a buggy, also on Route 358, with his children four young children on May 10, when a drunken driver sped toward them in a pickup truck. Jennifer Crenshaw, 38, of Geneva, Ohio, crossed the center line, struck a utility pole and her truck rolled into the buggy.

All the occupants were ejected and hospitalized with moderate to critical injuries. The children have since been discharged from Children's Hospital. Their father was moved from intensive care last week.

The Kempf crash did not fit common patterns, said Cory Anderson, a member of the Beachy Amish, the most liberal of Amish communities. He is completing a master's thesis at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond on the 76 documented crashes between motor vehicles and buggies in Pennsylvania in 2006.

"The motorist had already made an error independent of the buggy's presence, and the buggy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said.

The Byler crash was more typical, he said, because the buggy was struck from behind, although the late hour was unusual. Contrary to a popular belief, early morning and late afternoon, when the low sun blinds drivers, are the most dangerous times for buggies, he said.

Of 31 rear-end crashes in 2006, he said, 14 occurred when the sun was near the horizon.

"The other two major factors in rear-end crashes are driver distraction and the buggy being hidden from view because of it being just on the other side of a hill. It is rarely because of illumination," he said.

Between 2003 and 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation counted 330 collisions between horse-drawn buggies and motor vehicles. Of 343 buggy crashes between 2002 and 2006, there were 16 fatalities, said David Pritt, safety press officer for PennDOT.

Buggies don't have seat belts. The passengers usually sit above the level of impact, so they are ejected from a fragile vehicle that can't protect them.

"It's a better bet to get launched out of the buggy during a crash and land on the road than to be in it when it shatters," Anderson, the Amish researcher, said. "Injuries are either very minor or major to fatal, with little in between."

PennDOT and its Ohio equivalent have been working with Amish communities and local law enforcement to encourage buggy safety. They've worked in high-concentration Amish communities toward guidelines for consistent buggy markings, said Everette Burkholder, current publisher of Buggy Builder's Bulletin.

Five years ago on Christmas Eve, Junior Wengerd, an Amishman with a contractor sales business in Fredericksburg, Ohio, survived a collision with an oversize pickup truck in broad daylight. He was near his home on a road that appeared clear when he rounded a small knob. The young driver who struck him from behind was speeding and talking on a cell phone, he said.

Wengerd was thrown clear and knocked unconscious. When he came to, he thought he was fine and tried to reassure the driver who had struck him. Forgiveness is a primary spiritual rule of the Amish.

"They didn't think I was going to make it," he said. "I was off work for quite a while and it was two and a half years before I was fully able to do my work."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)