In the wake of the 2009 Michigan child death of a 2-year-old girl who was
strangled in a vertical blind cord’s loop, the US Consumer Production
Safety Commission is recalling 315,000 horizontal blinds and 139,000 vertical
blinds, both custom-made, by BlindXpress. The blinds were sold in Indiana,
Ohio, and Michigan from January 1995 through December 2011.
The custom-made vertical blinds come with an adjustment cord that shapes
into a loop and doesn’t attach to the floor or wall. The loop may
have a weighted device at its bottom. Meantime, the horizontal cords lack
an inner cord device to keep someone from pulling out the cords, which
can pose a strangulation risk should one of the cords get out and a child
were to get entangled in it. The CPSC is pressing consumers to stop using
the window blinds right away. They should also get in touch with the Window
Covering Safety Council (WCSC) to ask for your free repair kit.
Over the past few years, our products liability law firm has blogged about
the dangers posed by window blinds and their accompanying cords. According
to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, most blind cord
deaths involve kids ages 16 months to three years. Most of these victims
tend to be toddlers. (It is not unusual for a toddler to have a head that
is proportionately heavier than his/her body. Add active mobility and
his/her not fully developed muscle control to the equation, and it could
hard for him/her to get free in the event of entanglement in a window
blind cord.) Young children are more prone to suffocation than older kids
and adults.
Industry critics blame manufacturers for not doing enough to make window
blinds safer. Eliminating all cords from window blinds is one solution.
Yet cordless window blinds are not just harder to make, they are also
more expensive to buy. Such costs are reportedly leading window blind
makers to create less expensive options, such as blinds with covered or
retractable cords. It doesn’t help that the standards for window
blinds are voluntary and not mandatory. Also, even with such efforts,
figures show that approximately one child window blind suffocation happens
each month.
Child Products Liability
If window blinds caused your child’s strangulation death, do not
hesitate to contact The Gilbert Law Group® to request your free consultation.
With over 200 US children having died from window blind cord accidents
in the last two decades, this is clearly a problem that has not gone away.
Our window defects lawyers know how devastating it can be to discover
that your child’s life was cut short or irrevocably altered because
of a defective or unsafe product.
Death of Child Prompts Recall of Window Blinds by Blind Xpress, CPSC,
September 6, 2012
Concern Grows Over Window Blind Safety, The New York Times, April 20, 2011
Parents for Window Blind Safety
Window Covering Safety Council (WCSC)
2-Year-Olds Death By Cord Strangulation Leads to Recall of 454,000 BlindXpress Window Blinds
Posted By
The Gilbert Law Group