 Welcome back to this public hearing of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. Our hearing that began this morning at 10 a.m. will now resume. Just a reminder, this is our annual public hearing on the Commission's agenda and priorities for the next two fiscal years. We have heard from two panels already, and we are now going to hear from our third. On this panel, we are pleased to have Lisa Seifert from Shane's Foundation. Ms. Sheila Bearden, a consumer. Mr. Will Wallace from the Consumer's Union. Ms. Daniela Iverson from the International Federation of Inspection Agencies. And Mr. Gary Coles, another consumer. I want to thank all of you very much for being here, for taking the time, and for some in particularly difficult situations. Thank you all for being here and look forward to hearing your testimony with that. Ms. Seifert, you may begin. Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to submit comments today on the CPSC's agenda and priorities. I'm Lisa Seifert, Executive Director of Shane's Foundation. Love you. I said to my baby boy, love you, he said back from his bed as I close the door to his bedroom for his afternoon nap. Later I went to wake my baby from his nap as my husband came in from yard work. My husband heard a sound that was unrecognizable, my screams. I found Shane under his dresser. I'm a wife and a mother of a daughter who's 11 years old and a mother to my son, Shane, who is two, forever. I founded Shane's Foundation in 2012, a mere year after Shane passed away. I felt the urgent need to warn parents of this hidden danger in their homes. No family should go through the death of their child, especially one that is so easily preventable. And no child should pass away in such a horrific way as Shane did. Shane's Foundation is a child safety nonprofit organization focusing on furniture, TV, and appliance tip over awareness and prevention. And I need your help. Anchor it. I am proud to be an anchor at mom. I believe anchor it is crucial to the public's awareness of this hidden hazard. Much effort and funding has already gone into this program and I urge you to continue this campaign and distribution of the materials. You have a good foundation of partnerships dedicated to building the momentum of this program. I firmly believe anchor it should be a priority to continue to use these resources. The anchor it message is especially important to families that need to anchor furniture already in their homes as well as to the need to use the straps that come with their new furniture. While we await complete data on fatalities, the recent 2017 CPSC tip over report reflects 2011, 12, and 13 fatalities rising on an average from one death every 14 days to one every 10 days. This data is before the anchor it campaign that started in 2015. So I urge you to continue to fund the anchor it campaign since the data is still incomplete. I agree this campaign needs to be analyzed and directed and modified to be the most effective. While anchor it program and anchoring is not the only answer. I also think the CPSC should encourage manufacturers to look to design solutions to tipping furniture. We urge the CPSC to continue to prioritize this work giving the staff the time and resources they need to develop strong standards that will reduce reduce injuries and deaths from dressers and clothing storage units. Manufacturers need to hear your voice and support with your leadership in ASTM committees, making a stronger ASTM standard. The current standard is not adequate. The standard should mimic real life use. The weight of 60 pounds carpet surface loaded drawers and include all furniture, even those units shorter than 30 inches. When this can be achieved and made a mandatory standard, then it may be federally enforceable. I urge the CPSC to recall furniture that does not meet the current standard. As Commissioner Robinson stated, you have a recall template. You may you should use it. Your leadership will show a commitment to safer furniture with these recalls and send a message to manufacturers. Recalls need to be accelerated to take taking dangerous products off the market. Further companies with recalls such as IKEA need to be helped with recall effectiveness. The public needs to be made aware of and steps be taken on how to get that product fixed or out of their homes. Chance, Megan, Brayden, Curran, Ted, Camden, Nick, Katie, Jacob and my Shane. These children are not just statistics. There are sons and our daughters, our babies taken away from loving families. I heard someone say concrete changes that can be made now will save lives. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak today. Thank you very much, Ms. Bearden. My name is Sheila Bearden and I thank you for having me. I hold before you a 2006 technical report prepared by Dr. Richard Shaughnessy for the CPSC assessing potential health effects and establishing ozone exposure limits for ozone-generating air cleaners. On page 30, Shaughnessy warns that with continued research in the near future as we better understand adverse byproducts of ozone-initiated reaction, more stringent ozone limits may be warranted. On page 41 it says concerning sensitive populations, infants and children, the elderly, those with asthma, COPD. It would be prudent to consider a margin of safety to protect these groups. Shaughnessy says the question remains as to whether sensitive populations should be advised to avoid exposures to intentionally generated ozone until a margin of safety can be determined. And I also think Commissioner Adler had read this before, but it says one peer reviewer thought that there was no threshold exposure limit below which there were no health effects for sensitive populations. And I do agree with that. California is the only state to regulate indoor air quality and they have banned some ozone-generating air cleaning devices. But even they haven't gone for enough. Who takes care of consumers in the other 49 states? A 2015 paper by the EPA says that the body of scientific evidence about ozone's effects on health has significantly expanded since the EPA last reviewed the standard in 2008. The American Lung Association notes that in 2017 scientific paper researchers found evidence that older adults faced a higher risk of premature death even with levels of ozone pollution remained well below the current national standard. The EPA estimates that 5 to 20 percent of the total U.S. population has an unexplained greater susceptibility to ozone. Perhaps I was unknowingly a part of the sensitive population of which Dr. Shaughnessy warned. You have before you a photo. The particle matter deposited on our bedside tables, products of an ozone-initiated reaction. Our house was not pungent smelling from the new building products, but six months later became pungent smelling when I turned our filter zone to run continuously. Science tells us that this would be acids and aldehydes. Much has been made in your report of setting standards for accumulated ozone. However, in the presence of VOCs, ozone will not accumulate. It will react, result in harmful byproducts. Recent science tells us that ozone effects are sensory nerves. So you see, there are other less obvious, equally harmful, and often more painful effects of ozone exposures. I have suffered every day for ten years now. I don't look sick, I just burn. Just laying my head on my pillow triggers burning pain. My sensory nerves are hyper responsive. They are sensitized. At the time of your last report, science would not easily have been able to explain my burning pain. But in 2015, Dr. David Julius was a major contender for the Nobel Prize in Medicine for determining how our sensory nerves respond to irritants. Furthering Dr. Julius' research, in 2010, Dr. Thomas Taylor Clark issued his paper, Ozone Activates Airway Nerves via the Selective Stimulation of Trip A1 Ion Channels. Did you hear me say that ozone activates nerves? I learned that ozone not only activates Trip A1 pain receptors in the lungs, it also activates Trip A1 receptors on the trigeminal nerves. These innervate our eyes, our tongue, our scalp, and more. For eight and a half years, I've had burning mouth syndrome. My mouth feels like it's scalded. My being sensitized to ozone, a Trip A1 irritant, means that I am now sensitive to all Trip A1 irritants. Responses to these channels act like allergies, but they are injuries. It took me three years to realize that I suffered from neuropathic pain. Only then did I get a degree of help. And if you know of people with diabetic neuropathy, that burning pain, those are the same receptors except they usually have pain in their feet. My pain is in my face. So many things now trigger my pain, cleaning products, fragrances, touch, and more. This is the area of study that most excites me with permission of hydro biosciences. I've provided you with the graph showing the increased interest in the pain inflammatory channels that I'm talking about. I think you have that before you. Do you see the rise in interest? I've been studying Trip channels for seven years now. Pain is a powerful motivator. On a trip to London, I met with a respiratory pharmacologist who conference him the leading lung specialist in London, Dr. Jacqueline Smith. Dr. Belvesi that I met with has recently been named vice president and head of respiratory inflammation and autoimmunity at AstraZeneca. She and Dr. Jacqueline Smith have expressed an interest in writing with me. Not because I'm a great writer, but because I show evidence that what recent science says can happen does happen. I'm not the first, but one of the first to understand. My husband and architect had access to a calibrated ozone measuring device. In the areas of our home where I spent the most time, the ozone measured at 30 parts per billion. Honeywell says that EACs produce more ozone when they are new. Our measurements were taken when the units were seven months old. Consumer reports measured the same type of equipment and found that the numbers to be closer to 50 parts per billion. In contrast to Honeywell says that these filters produce only five to ten parts per billion. The EPA sets limits for eight-hour exposures and establishes health impact levels for outdoor ozone. Electronic air cleaner exposures may be continuous 24 hours, 48 hours, for as long as an individual is in that home. According to the EPA, the cumulative amount of exposure is a function of both the rate and duration of exposure. My mother developed lung cancer, and I couldn't be near her if I was sick. I was sick all summer. In hopes of getting well, I stayed home for two solid weeks. My air cleaners were continuously producing ozone. Instead of getting well, my health declined significantly. My exposure would be almost 24 hours a day, 14 days. That total is 336 hours of exposure. Would establishing an ozone limit based on eight-hour exposure be acceptable for me? I can touch on a few things that Honeywell did wrong. When replying to my email complaint, Honeywell acknowledged that some people have sensitivities to ozone. How would a customer know that? Honeywell's website tells us the presence of white dust is actually an indicator that your electronic air cleaner is working properly. When the truth is that ozone-initiated action can produce particle matter, you saw the photos. Owners' guides say that ozone odor, and they call it odor, they don't call it ozone, can be reduced by adding an activated carbon filter, yet they still know such filter. For every complaint consumers might have, they tell us all as well. I can tell you that all is not well, but we do not just have a Honeywell issue. We have an industry issue. You don't hear more complaints because consumers would never imagine that an air cleaner installed out of site under the house would trigger headaches or other neuropathic pains, yet they do. If my mother with COPD or a child with asthma had become sick in her home, we would never have made the connection. In fact, an elderly friend developed respiratory issues on two occasions after visiting our home. Because I was healthy, I knew something was terribly wrong. What has been done to follow up on Dr. Shaughnessy's report? He uses the phrases, may warrant more stringent ozone limits in the near future, and it would be prudent to warn the sensitive population. That was 12 years ago. Electronic air cleaners are not air cleaners. We have safer options. I want you to use all the tools available to you to protect the public. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Wallace. Thank you. On behalf of Consumers Union, the Advocacy Division of Consumer Reports, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. We appreciate the chance to present our views to you on the commission's agenda and priorities for the next two fiscal years. The CPSC has an indispensable public health and safety mission. It plays a major role in protecting U.S. consumers. Despite lacking many of the tools and resources, it would need to carry out all that it's capable of doing. It is essential for the CPSC to do several things to work on behalf of consumers. It should make effective use of the tools and resources it has. Leverage actions by companies, standards development organizations, advocates and consumers to advance the public interest, maximize its transparency and public accountability regarding product safety, and identify ways to improve its work in the future. For the CPSC to achieve these goals, we urge the agency to focus on the following overarching priorities. First, safety leadership and expertise. It is critical for the CPSC, especially the chairman as the highest profile figure, to be a vocal advocate for consumer safety. This leadership role includes communication about long understood hazards, as well as timely and prominent information about new or emerging hazards or potential hazards. More broadly, the CPSC should set a high bar for safety culture, safety standards and responses to safety issues. It should repeatedly and consistently urge companies to reach that high bar and require them to do so when they do not act on their own. That would include public and private advocacy for companies and trade groups to act in support of safety, even when they may not want to, as well as support for mandatory requirements when companies fail to act voluntarily. Given statutory limitations, it is also important for the CPSC to help ensure that the voluntary standards process yields timely and significant safety improvements for consumers. The agency should provide CPSC testing and research data and ensure informed, vocal and influential CPSC staff participation. It should help ensure that the voluntary standard groups are open and balanced, that they follow a fair process, and that there is continual progress for safety in the form of timely and robust updates to standards. Crucially, the commission also should be vocal that it is willing to use mandatory standards to achieve safety goals through regulation. If voluntary standards are not effective enough or lack substantial compliance. In addition, the commission must value the safety expertise of CPSC staff. Staff should continue to be empowered to take leadership roles in voluntary standards development. They should be able to conduct research, educate the public, identify and reduce hazards, and pursue compliance and enforcement actions as the law and their experience dictate. As an independent regulatory agency, the CPSC has been directed by Congress to look out for the safety of Americans in a manner relatively insulated from outside pressures. The work of CPSC staff should always reflect this charge. Second, effective recalls, market surveillance and enforcement. To us, all recalls should happen as quickly, as completely and as easily for consumers as possible. Unfortunately, recalls vary widely in how well they fulfill these goals. We have previously made several recommendations to the agency on how to improve recalls. These include how to encourage prompt reporting of incidents, communicate effectively to consumers, better incentivize effective recalls, hold companies accountable and change corporate behavior, and explore the effectiveness of different approaches and the potential of new methods with stakeholders. It also is important for the agency to keep watch over as many ports as possible to prevent import of dangerous products into the U.S. and more broadly monitor the marketplace to ensure that older, unsafe products are removed from commerce. Third, transparency and public accountability. Unfortunately, the CPSC operates under severe constraints on its ability to be transparent with the public. Section 6B and related regulatory provisions are ill-considered and often damage the agency's ability to fulfill its safety mission. The CPSC should be able to inform the public about legitimate safety hazards regardless of whether or not a company wants that to occur and should work to do so as broadly and as aggressively as possible within the confines of statute. The CPSC must prioritize its mission to protect consumers over the anonymity of companies when their products have created a substantial risk of injury to the public. We also urge the CPSC to improve transparency and reinforce its accountability to the public in several other ways. Despite staff's best efforts, Freedom of Information Act backlogs that keep the public from learning important information about safety issues and fail to comply with agency regulations on timelines should be eliminated. Those exist despite staff's best efforts. There should be far greater public availability of corrective action plan terms and recall performance and we know that some work is under way to make that happen. And the CPSC should push companies to carry out timely, complete and straightforward recalls that they have committed to undertake. That push should not be limited by company resistance to disclosure. In addition, we have long supported the saferproducts.gov database. The CPSC should make the database up-to-date and more consumer-friendly, increase public awareness and use, use consumer postings to help track trends and identify emerging hazards and conduct frequent follow-up investigations. Fourth, funding and staffing. The CPSC should request and receive additional funding and staff to implement fuller programs in order to prevent consumer harm, as well as to respond to safety problems in the marketplace. We appreciate the efforts of the chairman and other commissioners to prevent cuts in resources and secure the funds that recently were allocated. At the same time, we recognize that the agency is not currently resourced. No more funds requested at a level reflecting that product safety truly is a federal priority. In addition to our broad points, there are certain hazards that we particularly urge the CPSC in the coming months to work hard to address. They include the following. Tip-over incidents. On March 22nd, Consumer Reports published a major package of stories about the dangers of furniture tip-over incidents to young children. As highlighted in the story, there is no easy way for consumers to tell from looking at a dresser or its packaging whether it is more or less likely to tip-over. At present consumers essentially must place their trust in manufacturers. Based on CR's investigation and testing, we are calling on the CPSC to set a strong mandatory safety standard, which among other things would allow the agency to enforce the rules more easily, enforce the rules, and more easily gain industry cooperation for recalls. CR will be discussing the findings on the fourth panel, and in greater detail, informal comments submitted to the CPSC this week. Portable generators. We appreciate the ongoing work by the CPSC to examine the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning associated with portable generators. CR periodically tests and rates portable generators, and it is exploring potential tests to account for their carbon monoxide emissions. CR also promotes safety by helping consumers use portable generators safely. As the incident data make tragically clear, education and warning labels alone are not enough to protect consumers from poisoning. We urge the CPSC to keep moving forward on a mandatory safety standard that applies across the marketplace. We also have been participating in voluntary standards activities. There has been much work on this topic over the last year, but the work is not yet complete, and it must continue. A comprehensive solution to CO injuries and deaths associated with portable generators should incorporate both reduced CO emissions and a shut-off mechanism for when concentrations of the gas reach hazardous levels. Regardless of the venue, we seek to work with manufacturers, regulators and other safety advocates to identify the most effective safety and performance provisions. We ultimately hope to achieve a single, strong and forcible standard that dramatically reduces or eliminates deaths and injuries associated with portable generators. Internet Connected Consumer Products. We welcomed news of the public CPSC hearing scheduled for May 16th about potential safety issues and hazards associated with Internet Connected Consumer Products. We generally agree with the commission's description in its hearing notice of the issues at hand, and we encourage strong and swift efforts to help consumers in this area. We look forward to addressing the May hearing. Finally, the CPSC has a critical role, as I mentioned, one that consumers union strongly supports and defends. This role is important for consumer safety and for the sake of a fair marketplace, in which companies benefit if they meet their responsibilities to put consumer safety first. In the coming years, we look forward to continuing to work with the CPSC and urge the commission to carry out its work in a manner consistent with our shared goal of protecting consumers. Thank you very much, Mr. Wallace. Ms. Iverson. Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to be here. My name is Danielle Iverson, and I'm a Senior Regulatory and Product Compliance Consultant with TUV Rhineland. Today, I'm here to present remarks on behalf of Roberta Tellis, the Executive Director of the International Federation of Inspection Agencies, also known as IFIA. IFIA is the Global Trade Association for the third-party testing inspection and tick certification industry, also known as the tick industry. IFIA members provide independent third-party conformity assessment services across a wide range of sectors, including food, consumer products, petroleum, agriculture, medical device, infrastructure, and many others, covering virtually all sectors of the economy. IFIA welcomes CPSC's outreach to stakeholders in requesting inputs for the commission's agenda and priorities for fiscal year 2019 and 2020. IFIA recommends that CPSC continue collaboration with industry and other groups in the fulfillment of its mission in order to leverage resources and multiply its impact. Specifically, IFIA recommends close collaboration with the independent testing, inspection, and certification industry through trade associations such as this. IFIA's 60-plus members have a global footprint and are present in more than 160 countries and have the technical expertise and capabilities in all aspects of product safety. They provide services that help ensure safety and compliance across all stages of the supply chain, from the design stages to post-retail. Manufacturers, retailers, and importers of all sizes rely on IFIA's members as a cost-effective solution to meet their legal obligations and demonstrate compliance with safety standards and regulations. With that in mind, potential opportunities for collaboration for the CPSC to consider are first, continuing partnering with IFIA members to leverage their technical expertise and global footprint and CPSC's training of manufacturers and designers in manufacturing countries including Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam. Part of the services provided by IFIA members is training and advising on product safety requirements and best practices across the globe. These trainings help ensure that safety is being built in the earliest stages of the supply chain and it is a preventative and cost-effective approach. IFIA welcomed the opportunity to partner with CPSC in 2017 to deliver training to designers and manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries in China. This was a great example of partnership and collaboration with the private sector that CPSC should continue exploring in order to leverage private sector technical expertise and capabilities to help fulfill its mission. IFIA members welcome similar future opportunities to continue supporting CPSC's mission. Second, leverage IFIA as a platform for the dissemination of best practices and other issues. Given the role that IFIA members play not only in providing testing but also advisory services and training on U.S. product safety requirements, CPSC could leverage IFIA members in educating and reinforcing best practices as members deploy their own individual training, webinars, and other outreach efforts to the regulated community. IFIA can provide a platform for ongoing discussion and collaboration with the conformity assessment industry. Third, organize stakeholders' roundtables on consumer product testing practices. A roundtable could be a useful mechanism for testing labs and other stakeholders to share consumer product testing best practices and underlying technical considerations to address trends and issues. The roundtable could also be used as feedback mechanism to and from testing labs and provide an opportunity to identify areas where it would be beneficial that the labs work together on. IFIA will welcome the opportunity to help organize this roundtable in partnership with CPSC and other groups. Fourth, engage with industry and counterparts to discuss emerging hazards such as IOT and cybersecurity. IFIA members are working with industry partners on cybersecurity and IOT-related issues to help mitigate safety and performance risk. Their experience can be a valuable resource to CPSC as the Commission looks to IOT emerging issues within CPSC jurisdiction. IFIA also recommends that CPSC exchange views with its internal counterparts in this area to exchange best practices and ensure solutions being considered are global in order to avoid creating unique approaches that can burden industry with no added level to safety. IFIA members are actively contributing to the discussions taking place in Europe with a proposed certification scheme for ICT products that is currently being discussed at the European Parliament and European Council. This proposal will create a EU-wide certification scheme eliminating duplicative national requirements as some member states are already coming up with their own individual certification schemes. Although the safety regimes among countries are different and different solutions might be needed depending on a particular market's reality, the exchange of goods and practices and lessons learned can provide valuable insights to inform future CPSC work in this area. And lastly, the CPSC should consider leveraging partner private sector conformity assessment when designing conformity assessment programs to fulfill policy needs. As described in OMB's circular A-119, federal agencies are encouraged to rely on private sector conformity assessment, testing, inspection, and certification auditing, etc., whenever possible to leverage efficiencies and save the agency's resources. Many governments across the globe rely on private sector third party conformity assessment to save resources while fulfilling their mission to protect health, safety, and the environment. The CPSC's reliance on third party testing for children's products, along with other measures, is an example of such public-private partnership that has been successful in helping drive compliance and keep children safe. In addition, there are a variety of conformity assessment tools provided by the independent tick sector that go well beyond testing and that are used by manufacturers, retailers, and importers, such as factory audits, capability audits, inspections, design evaluations, safety assessments, and certification, among others. All these conformity assessment tools help mitigate risk, ensure compliance, and give visibility across complex supply chains, making the tick sector a trusted partner to industry and governments. The choice of the appropriate conformity assessment method should always be based on risk assessment and confident needs applicable to a particular situation, since there is no one-size-fits-all in conformity assessment. Third party conformity assessment provides higher levels of assurance of compliance with safety requirements, and IFIA survey reviewed small household appliances on the U.S. and U. markets and have found that 17 percent of products that were not third party certified had safety critical failures, such as high risk or fire or permanent injury, compared to less than 1 percent for products with third party certification. This survey sheds light on the value of third party conformity assessment and providing higher levels of confidence and compliance with safety standards and regulations, and reinforces how different avenues for demonstrating compliance deliver different levels of assurance. So, IFIA appreciates the opportunity to present and looks forward to working with the Commission in fulfillment of its mission. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Coles. Madam Chairman, Commissioners, good afternoon. My name is Gary Coles. My wife, Terry, and I thank you for this opportunity to speak today on behalf of our 10-year-old son, Rusty Coles. We live on Mobile Bay in Fairhope, Alabama. I'm a civil engineer, Terry is a nurse, and we're the parents of four children. Rusty was the most incredible child. He did things no one thought possible, and he did them with ease. He was an outdoorsman. He loved to hunt fish and farm. He could master any skill and move on to the next. His personality was so big. He was a beast on the football field, but cried every time he watched the blind side. He loved babies and dogs. He was a loving child, holding hands with his mom or dad, snuggling with his grandmother, riding piggyback on his brother George, on the couch watching sports with his brother Edward, or acting out dramatic presentations with his sister Marguerite and her friends. He wanted to be a country singer and have a band with his sister Marguerite. He was the hardest worker. Chop wood, plow, plant fields, whatever the project Rusty was all in. He loved to be outside, throwing the cast net, fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, or walking in the woods. God had big plans for Rusty. Rusty was killed on December 17, 2016 when the 2008 Polaris Ranger 800 EFI he was driving sustained a slow quarter turn roll onto his driver's side and pinned his leg. Because the Ranger had an open fuel tank vent line, gas and vapors leaked out, causing an explosion. I was the first person on the scene, but I was too late to save Rusty. We're here today because we want to prevent other families from experiencing the type of tragedy our family has suffered. We have been trying to understand how this could have happened. We learned that a rollover check valve well known in the automotive industry would have prevented the fuel from leaking. If our Ranger had this device, Rusty would be alive today. We are aware that for over 40 years automotive standards required fuel system crash worthiness features on passenger vehicles and trucks, including rollover check valves. Most fuel driven engine vehicles, like motorcycles, personal watercraft and snowmobiles, are subject to standards that require some type of fuel system rollover crash worthiness, including check valves. We understand that Polaris was well aware of the need for a rollover check valve on the fuel system of its Ranger product line. In 2006, the year Rusty was born, Polaris received reports from its gas tank supplier identifying leaking fuel during a rollover as a potential failure mode for a 2008 model Ranger. Even though Polaris had this information, they continued to manufacture Rangers without a rollover check valve until 2011. Thousands of the pre-2011 vehicles are still used by unsuspecting consumers every day. We are aware that Polaris has been sued three times by consumers who alleged the lack of a rollover check valve caused severe injury or death. Polaris has taken no steps to recall the pre-2011 Ranger product line with this defect or to warn consumers of this unreasonably dangerous condition. We urge the CPSC to recall existing Polaris Rangers with an open fuel tank vent line. We also urge the CPSC to require that warnings or notices be issued to consumers so they can be worn to this defect. Finally, we urge the CPSC to enact mandatory standards that require ROVs to be manufactured with well-known fuel system crash worthiness features to which other vehicle manufacturers are subject. It is our hope that action will be taken by the CPSC so other families do not have to suffer the tragedy that our family has endured. We will never forget Rusty, and it is our hope that this effort on his behalf will save other lives. Thank you all. Thank you very much, Mr. Coles. We will now begin the commission's 10-minute rounds of questions for each commissioner, and I will begin the line of questioning. I'll begin with Ms. Sievert. Again, thank you for being here and for the courage you've exhibited in creation of Shane's Foundation and all that you've done. I want to just talk a little bit about, because you saluted the Anchorage campaign, and I see that as one prong in addressing this hazard, and would like to ask your advice or opinion as to how we could strengthen that campaign and how we could clarify it and make it more. How can we get the consumers' attention to pay attention to the issue? Thank you. I think one way you can reach more consumers, ramp it up. I think you can continue to expand your partnerships, particularly with safety organizations. Bigger the better. Possibly look at, especially, national organizations. Maybe look at hospital networks. I find that hospital networks are more than willing to share handouts and or just the information in their prenatal classes or to new moms. Consider contacting national moving companies. That's when furniture is being moved around. That's something they maybe can bring down and show their customer how to use straps or that they should be using straps. I find that people look to safety organizations. That's why I mentioned safety organizations instead of the CPSC. If they're looking for child-proofing, they don't necessarily go to the CPSC. So expanding Anchorage into organizations, safety organizations might reach more people. I don't know how you can make it more dramatic than having the three moms. But other than that, I think Anchorage is a good program. Thank you very much. Ms. Bearden, in your testimony, you mentioned that there are safer options available. Can you expand upon that a little bit? I understand that HEPA filters are now a safer option. I've been told that by the American Lung Association. And in fact, I know that Honeywell does sell those filters and they are also installed under the house a safer option. But other things, like for some reason, I don't know this for sure, but I believe that at some point Honeywell may have had plans or may have even had charcoal or carbon filters to reduce the ozone. You may have seen in my report that I gave to you that they highly recommended that for a commercial manual that I read that ozone should be eliminated from the air before it went out into the public. But they have no such thing for the general consumer. Maybe they think we're not smart enough to figure it out. And for a long time, until the discovery of these sensory nerves, we weren't able to figure it out. So I think that it would be more expensive than maybe not next to the ionized wires. They say it's a fire hazard, but maybe at some point they could have it removed from the ionized wires. But honestly, I don't even think that filters are needed at all. There are safer options. Thank you. And I look forward to continuing our conversation. Mr. Wallace, thank you for being here and thank you to Consumer Reports for the very helpful and instructive report that you just did on tip overs and for all the work that you do and for our regular meetings with you. And we appreciate the working together on these issues. With regards to the tip overs, because in your study, you referenced clothing storage units below 30 inches. And I'm wondering, do you have data or research showing it's possible for manufacturers to make clothing storage units under 30 inches compliant with a 60-pound weight standard? Thank you so much for the question. So first of all, I will say that Don Huber of Consumer Reports is on the fourth panel and plans to address the subject, including our specific test findings. But what I can say is that what we found in our testing is that units 30 inches and smaller have a propensity to tip based on our test protocol. And therefore, it doesn't make sense for them to be left out of the stability standard. Thank you very much. I want to talk about portable generators as well. I'm sure you were here for Mr. Wiestat and PGMA this morning. And I believe UL has testimony as well in the record today. But I want to talk a little bit to you about the PGMA and what was this morning. Do you have any, have you reviewed the data that PGMA was referring to with the 99% that will address 99% of the CO fatalities? So we had an opportunity to review some limited data back at the time that the Canvas group was most active. However, with regard to the data that PGMA referred to this morning, that's something that was made available to us yesterday. And we haven't had the time yet to fully review it. We do plan to do so. We do plan to remain involved. And we, a statement was made this morning that the standard is effective. We're not there yet. We can't say that after an independent evaluation. But we are committed to working toward a standard that is effective, regardless of the venue, while at the same time recognizing that a comprehensive solution is one that involves both reducing emissions and a shutoff mechanism. Thank you. And one last question on the portable generator. Your testimony indicated that you're interested in a comprehensive solution, which would include the low emission technology along with the shutoff technology. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you may reach that conclusion and why the UL standard to you is more attractive than PGMA? I wouldn't agree with that last part. We have not said that the UL standard is more attractive to us than the PGMA standard. What we said in our involvement during the PGMA process is that there were parts of the standard that did not adequately account for consumer safety. And we think that there is the possibility for the PGMA standard to improve in critical ways and perhaps become the kind of standard that we're looking for and that would adequately protect consumers. But as of the latest version that we had seen, we thought that there were portions of it that didn't do enough for consumer safety. When it comes to reduce, when it comes to shutoff reducing emissions, all that, we are, we understand that PGMA's data is focused on its effectiveness relative to averting fatalities when CO accumulates. We, as I said, we need, we will be continuing to review the data and make sure that it's, well, and independently assess it. But at the same time, we also have to look at injuries. Thank you very much. Ms. Iverson, I'm just wondering if you've reached out to our small businesses on Budsman and tried to collaborate on any webinars or trainings. We have a very robust, albeit a small staff, but a very robust SBO, Small Business on Budsman's office. And they are very active in doing webinars and training sessions. And so I would respectfully suggest that you would, you know, if you would reach out to them and try to collaborate on some of these issues. Okay. Thank you for that suggestion. I'll make sure that they receive that. Thank you. And Mr. Coles, I want to first of all tell you how sorry I am for your loss. And I also want to assure you that the Consumer Product Safety Commission takes the thermal issues in these off-road highway vehicles very seriously as been reflected by our recent activity, but it's not something that will end. And I would like to talk to you further about it if you're willing to do that to see how we can advance your request of us today to make sure this agency is addressing that hazard. And so I will connect with you afterwards and make the, continue the conversation. And again, I thank you very much for being here along with Ms. Seifert. I say this all the time, but your courage in an incredibly difficult situation to come here and testify and help to educate this agency is greatly appreciated and you have my utmost respect. Thank you. Thank you all very much, Commissioner Adler. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I want to reiterate what the chair just said about Ms. Seifert and Mr. Coles. I'm a big crybaby and maybe the tears weren't flowing down my cheeks, but what you say will keep me awake at night with nightmares, and it should if we take our jobs conscientiously, which I know everybody up here does do. So thank you both for the strength and courage you showed in coming here. In particular, Ms. Seifert, you reminded me you'd been here two years ago, and we welcome you back, and again, we express our appreciation. I guess I just had one quick question, and that was, at the time you purchased the dresser, had you had the slightest warning whatsoever that there might be a tip over issue? This arose, I think, in 2011. That was a widely publicized matter, but is that something that had come to your attention? Not at all. We purchased the dresser from my daughter in 2005, and when I had my son, 2009, we did all the baby-proofing, everything off the shelves. The outlets, the locks, everything. There were no straps on the shelves. There were no warnings in the store. No warning, and this was furniture in particular for a baby's room. No warnings in the store. No signs, so I had no idea. Thank you. Mr. Coles, first of all, rusty sounds like a truly extraordinary child. I'm sorry, I never got to meet him. I did want to point out one thing that when you call for a mandatory standard, one of the most insidious things that happens to this poor agency is when we actually do start writing a mandatory standard, our friends in industry go running to the hill. They go to the appropriations committee and they put in what's called an appropriations writer. In the case of ROVs, it says we can't spend a dime or a penny working on a mandatory standard unless we conduct a study with the National Academy of Sciences to address issues we already know the answers to, and it is strictly a delaying tactic, and it's something that we see repeatedly time and time again. So I would hope as part of whatever campaign you're involved in that you take it upon yourself to speak to our friends on the hill and say when an agency is doing its job, when we are trying to promote safety, it is not useful for an industry lobbyist to go up and pretty much mislead what's going on at an agency and get them to impose restrictions on the commission doing its job, and I just share that with you. And if you have any comments, feel free at this point. Yes, sir, thank you for that. We met yesterday with a representative from Florida and we're going to meet today with a senator and with the other representative from Alabama as well. So we understand that is an issue and that's what happens on the hill. Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ms. Bearden, I was just curious. You would have had no way of knowing that you were sensitive to ozone and how long did it take and how did you finally discover you did have this sensitivity and still not fairly clear. It took quite a long time. I got sick the day we moved in. I told my husband that we should go ahead and go to Boston on a trip. I thought that something in our house was making me sick and I ended up in Mass General, the emergency department, wheezing, coughing. I came home during that first week our heating air contractor had told us to run the filters continually that that would help clean the air better. Just do that for a week or two. So when we turned home, my husband turned them back to the intermittent cycle and I was sick off and on all summer, not continuous and I kept in my mind, I kept thinking if something in my house were making me sick I would be sick all the time. So I went to my doctor, said something's wrong with me and I went home to turn on my air filters to run all the time again. It still took me until December to figure out what was happening. I read that I was reading about formaldehyde thinking, you know, I'd heard about that and so I read that electronic air filters are a poor source of indoor air quality because they can generate formaldehyde and that was the same night. I mean, my face was burning. I was trying to sleep outside because I couldn't sleep inside and I told my husband that and we went and turned them off. We had two units in our home and we went and turned them off. We left in search of a hotel to stay in and I couldn't tolerate any of the hotels. Everything smelled so strong and that's when I knew. That's when I knew what was going on. I'm not a doctor so I'm not going to pretend to be one but it's my understanding of conditions like yours, once sensitized, always sensitized. That's what I was afraid to hear. Thank you very much. Ms. Iverson, thank you for pinch hitting here today. It's always a pleasure to see you and I don't know if your friends at IFIA is that the pronunciation? Well, you can say I-F-I-A. You can say I-F-I-A as well, yes. I-F-I-A. Well, I have a particular concern if not obsession about the testing labs and that is that, and I really appreciate the chairman's suggestion that you talked to our SBO but time and time again we've heard these little manufacturers who have to do third-party testing and certification, especially those who make toys, complain about the costs associated with conducting tests and I've always wondered why this association, which has done so well as a result of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, has not developed some special program to deal with the little guys and this is just a suggestion to pass on unless you have some information that I'm not aware of. That is a suggestion that I will pass on. I thank you so much for that. Mr. Wallace, two things concern me about, not concern me, but you raised two important concerns. The first is the need for open, balanced, voluntary standard panels. That's been a particular concern of mine for the last couple of years and one of the biggest challenges in trying to get balance on voluntary standards organizations and I think we all know that at least in the current climate, the commission is finding it very difficult to move ahead on mandatory standards so we have to look to the voluntary standard sector. Well, if we're going to do that and they're going to really produce consensus standards, we need to have the panels be open and balanced and one of the biggest challenges in getting balance is finding consumers. So I'm wondering if Consumer Reports has any suggestions that would help the commission engage in outreach to bring more consumers into the voluntary standards process? Sure, and thanks very much for raising that concern in particular. It's one that we have experienced firsthand and I know that other safety groups and safety advocates have experienced it as well. One idea is to find engineers who aren't working full-time and who might be able to pitch in and that's something that we've been exploring. I appreciate that and in particular it seems to me there are these groups of retired engineers who might be very, very interested and have the time to dedicate to that so I certainly appreciate that. You also mentioned your difficulty in obtaining information from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because of Section 6B and I don't mean to steal any of your thunder, but from my perspective, 6B is nothing more than an information suppression device that industry now views as an entitlement. The way other folks look at Social Security and Medicare, I think industry just looks at 6B and it's not because we're producing more accurate and more fair information, it's because they are able to use that to leverage against the commission to keep important safety information from being released. So I guess my question to you is you've dealt not just with CPSC, but you've dealt with other agencies and we are the only agency that has a restriction like 6B which ostensibly is to guard against inaccurate and unfair information. So has it been your experience in trying to get information from other agencies that it's equally difficult or have you found that other agencies produce more unfair and inaccurate data when you seek information from them? In our experience, CPSC has is significantly more constrained than other agencies in releasing information, including important safety information that consumers should know. I thank you for that and there's an old line, not original with me, but safety delayed is safety denied. There are times when information is so vital and so critical, it must get out and we're not always able to do that. So I thank you for those comments. Thank you, Commissioner Adler, Commissioner Robinson. First of all, I want to just thank you for all of your efforts. You know my office and my staff have been very actively involved in all sorts of different ways to try to get our furniture more stable and one face that seems to be constant at all of those meetings is yours and I thank you for that. So I know you share my frustrations in the things that CPSC has finally got right and now we're backing off on and I know you share my frustrations with respect to the Voluntary Standards Committee that we see dominated as Mr. Wallace is talking about the concerns that we see dominated by furniture manufacturers instead of consumers. I just want to ask you, because you have talked about Anchor It, I do understand that's an interim sort of program, but is your end goal to make more stable furniture or to get the Anchor It campaign beefed up? Good question. Absolutely safe for furniture. Anchor It needs to be out there. People need to understand why their current furniture in their homes need to be anchored. The furniture in their homes may not be safe. Going forward, manufacturers should be making stable furniture. Thank you. Mr. Wallace, you were talking about and I wrote down exactly what you say. You were answering questions in response to Chairman Burkle's questions about the PGMA standard and you said we can't say that the standard is effective, but you just used standard and you had gone back and forth between UL and PGMA. Were you talking about the PGMA standard? I was referring to the PGMA standard. Thank you. Mr. Wallace, I also want to thank you for the report that Consumer's Report did on Unstable Furniture. It was very, very helpful. I want to say a few words, Mr. Coles, about our ROVs. We'll talk for just a few minutes. We're grabbing sandwiches. But first of all, thank you and your wife so much for coming and talking to us because I know that your whole goal is to make sure that it's safer and this doesn't happen to other kids. But Commissioner Adler referred to something about Congress and I know you're aware of some of that, but I just want to fill in just a little bit so you understand in terms of the mandatory standard and then I'm going to get to the other tools that we have. But the mandatory standard, our staff just did an amazing job and came up with an NPR. We really were talking about three inexpensive, easy ways to make ROVs safer that were absolutely proven that they would save lives and industry absolutely refused to do it. And when we had the hearings in 2015, the first thing they did was ran up to the Hill. And I think the word appropriations grow up in government, this is my first government job, doesn't mean much to most people but one of the reasons that certain people in power are upset with how effective the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been is that they aren't subject to appropriations. So Congress can't have industry come in and lobby them to get in the way of that but they can with respect to us. So basically 2016, 2017, 2018 as Commissioner Adler said we were given impossibly onerous and repetitive and unnecessary things that we would have to do in order to pass the standard. And that having been said, that had to do with stability, it didn't have to do with the fire danger. But I think the reality is here at the agency that we, with our limited resources are very skittish about going down that path, particularly with who's in control in Congress right now because we think that industry will do the exact same thing to us again and with all of that effort. At the same time, as Commissioner Adler said and as you've said you understood the mandatory standard isn't going to happen. But the current voluntary standard, which I don't think adequately addresses the rollover hazard, it does absolutely nothing with respect to the fire hazard. So that's certainly a direction in which we should be going. I know that Rusty's accident was different in terms of the rollover and not having the rollover check valve and catching on fire. But the fire hazard on ROVs is just, it's so huge and you're absolutely right that automobiles have been subject to a host of safety standards under NHTSA and other things like snowmobiles have those and we should have those as well. But we do have other tools and candidly I don't think we're using them effectively enough. There have been manufacturers who have failed for literally years to notify us of people who are getting killed and injured with fires and we get involved in any recall as some people may not know. So we have to know about it and so we need to really, really, really punish them severely when they don't do that. But we also when we receive reports about fires and some happen even when the vehicle isn't turned on and we need to get the message out there and we need to be more aggressive about doing that even if we don't know the exact cause on the vehicle that's causing the fire. I mean in your instance we know what caused Rusty's fire. Sometimes we don't know what caused the fires but this isn't a product liability lawsuit and we don't need to if they're dangerous we need to get the message out to the public and I firmly believe that ROVs should be treated just like any other dangerous products but we see the political clout that this industry has so it's very frustrating. I mean when somebody comes to us and they have a product that's dangerous they have a bunch of options and one of them is if they have a fix that our engineers think will work then we'll work with them on recalling to repair but if they don't have a repair that works we make them give a full refund and we have not done that with the ROV industry and I think that's something that we really, really need to consider and your testimony here today has just been very, very helpful and I appreciate both of you coming in. I want to turn for a moment to saverproducts.gov it's been pointed out by a few witnesses how much this website needs updated when I came to the commission it was at that point laughable I think by everyone how vociferously people fought us having a website and when we finally got it live in 2011 it went through a lot of effort to try to make it user friendly but it's just it's absolutely archaic right now I mean it just really, really needs the resources spent there are so many things we spent a lot of effort in my office trying to get everyone from lawyers, doctors, hospitals to report things that don't go into our nice system into saverproducts.gov but the numbers don't show that we were very effective but nevertheless we did try really hard and I hope that we're going to spend the resources both to try to get people to report to that website but also to bring it up to date so that people can search I mean it should be searchable on people's devices when they're out buying kids products so let me return to something I was mentioning earlier and Commissioner Adler has ably covered some of it but with 6B I think few people realize that what comes out of this commission almost all the time is something that is severely restricted because industry tells us what we can say and there's something just wrong with that when you're a consumer protection agency that somehow we can't tell the public we have all sorts of other restrictions just like other government agencies in terms of fairness and honesty and integrity but the idea that we have to go to a company and get it okayed to put out something just cripples us in terms of of what we can say and we also and a lot of people don't know this don't understand that our communications department at the agency I've now in 5 years worked under 4 commissioners or acting commissioners and it hasn't changed but I still find it incredible that our communications department is political so the chair controls everything that goes out in conjunction with whatever the company will let us say so I recently we recently did a recall of a very very dangerous product and I asked our communications department what can the hotline say when a consumer calls in and I gave a question that was very predictable that if I were a parent and owned this product I would want to call in and say and basically we were told that the company would only let us say that we were working with the company for safety what kind of response is that from a consumer product protection agency so I think we really need to work on the communications but with respect to 6B we can't do anything about the statute it's been there for a very long time it's going to be there we could do something about regulations I've been complaining about this from the get go I haven't been able to get 3 votes to change this but we don't need additional regulations but what you bring up by way of the FOIA request is something that's beyond the statute and beyond the regulations and for anyone in this room who is trying to protect consumers particularly I really encourage you to really put our feet to the fire on these FOIA things that come across my desk that have been that is not going out that are not going out to consumer groups and they have every right to it that's why we're supposed to be a transparent agency that's why we have FOIA and if something goes out and we've X'd out stuff put our feet to the fire make sure that we're really following FOIA thank you thank you Commissioner Robinson Commissioner Kay Mr. Calls I wanted to follow up on some of the ROV questions the fuel system issue that you raised that you talked about needing to be in a standard is it your understanding that currently some companies are not using those systems that are otherwise used in other type of automobiles currently I believe they are using them but those units that are 2011 or before many of them do not have an open rollover check valve that would prevent the free flow of fuel in a rollover event got it and so when you talked about having a mandatory standard what gap in your mind would that fill well it would fill the gap from voluntary because voluntary standards are not often done they are not often implemented and I think the most important thing would be to warn the consumer especially the consumers of these pre-2011 units that there are problems had we known there was a problem had our dealerships known that there were a problem we took them to two separate dealerships at different times just for service had they said you might want to think about it rollover check valve at the cost of whatever it might be very very minimal cost we certainly would have done that but we were not aware we obviously can't discuss for the many of the reasons you just heard we can't discuss publicly what we might be doing I can tell you I will follow up with our compliance staff to at least ask them to look into it and hopefully the chairman will as well do you have a sense are these these prior models from 11 and earlier are they still relatively common yes sir they're very common and also would you consider participating in future voluntary standards efforts at least to bring your experiences obviously you know Ms. Seifer does that from a furniture stability standpoint certainly if you're able to do that I think that would be useful yes sir we look forward to being involved in this from now on this is we've made an effort to bring this to light and we're not going to stop now we want everybody to know that this is a problem so this doesn't happen to another young man or young girl and I was encouraged that the chairman mentioned that she wanted to follow up with you I would encourage you to push with her for all of the relief you think is necessary both from the prior year models and also the mandatory standard and while commissioners Robinson and other laid out how difficult a case it could be to do a mandatory standard the chairman of the agency has a lot of power and if the chairman were so convinced to go to the hill and to say in one instance where we need a mandatory standard that would actually make a big difference and I said that having been the chairman and understanding the weight of somebody in that position and the responsibility and so even though it is a difficult challenge I would encourage you not to give up on the mandatory standard side and certainly to whatever you can encourage my friend to my left to advocate for on the hill would make a difference we certainly intend to do that we will never ever give up we will continue to be an advocate for that and we would like to work very much with the chairman and the commissioners on this issue thank you very much, thank you all thank you for coming Ms. Reardon I wanted to let you know as well as I told you earlier I did also follow up with our compliance staff on the issues that you raised and I hope that they will pursue it I can only ask in my current capacity but I did want to have you been in consultation with NIH at all have you worked with them on these issues? I have not no I don't know exactly who would I I may have talked with a few scientists at some point no I did reach out to Francis Collins and he had someone contact me and I have been set up at Vanderbilt with someone Vanderbilt University for some testing so that's not going to make me well but it will determine whether I had a genetic predisposition and it can go either way with people you can become sensitized based on exposure or you can have a genetic predisposition that makes you more sensitive hopefully my time will be paused I'll just keep asking questions I do it's really worth going through the website for NIH it's the National Institutes of Health so many different things they do there so many things can change over time as they fund more studies maybe the Vanderbilt connection could help in the immediate sense I think so they were pretty impressed who sent me there but I do think it's helpful for us and the nexus is that as our staff looks to try to figure out some of these chronic exposures we rely on the expertise of other agencies whether it's the CDC or NIH that do that root research that root cause research that we really need we don't just don't have the expertise in the depth of staff to do that at that level and we really need a partner to do some of that work what I know about trip channels what you will find going forward are things like the someone mentioned the plugins are things that we know particularly like sentiment is one of the ones that is the sensitizer and you will learn as you artificial vanilla vanilla is the sensitizer this will start coming your way now that this is out now that this new science has been discovered I mean there's so much more for you to know about this hopefully you can help our staff to make some of the connections that they need to learn about it and Ms. Seaford I wanted to follow up on some of the questions that have been asked to you about where you see this going forward and the agencies role and I mentioned during the first panel with Ms. McGee that the families deserve best efforts and deserve the agency to do everything that it can on all fronts not just on one front not just on education do you see from a current perspective that the agency is going full tilt in all of the areas that need to be done first about the anchor it absolutely it still is part of the whole puzzle anchor it should continue but I absolutely 100% think and know because it's being done today safer furniture can be made those meetings as Commissioner Robinson we know they they stall out and if we lose your support and the momentum we've already been making then we're going to have to start all over again so we need continued strong voices at the ASTM and especially from the CPSC representatives and do you feel like the staff has continued to do that or can you tell there's a difference at the staff level in terms of their involvement while at this moment because my understanding is that the staff level has not changed but what is lacking is them getting some type of support at the commission level some higher level agency leadership that really has a voice out there are you seeing that if your representatives aren't backed by you their voice isn't as strong and are you seeing them backed by us not like they were so there's more that could be done in your mind okay that's very helpful to know I have no more questions thank you thank you with that this concludes the third panel I want to thank Ms. Seyfert Ms. Bearden Mr. Wallace Ms. Iverson and Mr. Coles thank you all very much for your time here today for sharing your experiences and your knowledge with us at this point we will take a five minute break to reorganize for our fourth panel so thank you all very much welcome back we will now resume with our fourth and final panel of today's priorities hearing this panel includes Mr. Don Huber from Consumer Reports Mr. Remington Gregg from Public Citizen Mr. Russell Kinzador from the National Floor Safety Institute and Mr. Timothy Frank a consumer welcome to all of you for being here and we look forward to hearing your testimony Mr. Huber you may begin thank you first of all I'll just say I apologize for my voice and out sounds today I'm fighting a little bit of the of the springtime things that go on that affect sinus issues so I will do my best to be clear with my presentation first of all active Chair Berkel Commissioner Robinson Commissioner Adler, Commissioner Kay on behalf of Consumer Reports thank you for the opportunity to testify we appreciate the opportunity to share our views on the Commission's agenda and priorities for the next two physical years in the following comments I discussed several issues the CPSC should prioritize in physical years 2019 and 2020 first I'll talk about furniture tip overs it's been a topic I think that has been covered several times today but I don't think it's important enough that we cover it as much as we can over the past year Consumer Reports has conducted an investigation that included extensive research and performance of comparative testing of a cross section of clothing storage units marked at place the investigation sought to determine whether or not CSUs could be subjected to a more stringent testing in an effort to mitigate this politically potentially fatal tip over risk and to determine whether a given model is more or less likely to tip tip over relative to other models we analyzed CPSC data on thousands of incidents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act we found that the number of injuries and deaths from tip over related incidents remains too high we tested 24 models from a variety of major manufacturers we included models that are 30 inches tall or less which are not covered by the Voluntary Standard ASTM F2057-17 the testing performed by CR included a series of progressively more rigorous tests to see how these CSUs performed the first two tests were modeled after the unloaded and loaded stability tests in ASTM F2057 the third test was developed by CR and involved weight being added to the 50 pound test load of the ASTM standard in one pound increments until the CSU either tipped over or did not tip over when a load of 60 pounds was reached more than half of the CSUs we tested were able to remain upright with a 60 pound load applied these CSUs were at various price points and were different brands indicating that it is feasible to build a dresser that can meet a tougher standard at the current Voluntary Standard or than the current Voluntary Standard three of the four CSUs 30 inches or tall 30 inches tall or less failed to remain upright when subjected to a 50 pound load in the test modeled after the loaded stability test in ASTM F2057 excuse me I have lost control of my computer here for a second for some reason don't know how to get this back on the bottom not doing anything thank you very much I apologize for that CR concluded that the industry's Voluntary Standard leaves too many children at risk based on our investigation CR is calling for a tip over test weight for dressers to be increased to 60 pounds from 50 pounds and for dressers 30 inches or shorter to be included in the standard because they also can tip over CR will be presenting our findings at the next ASTM CSU subcommittee meeting we are also urging the commission to move forward with rulemaking adopting CPSC staff recommendations increasing the load for the stability test to 60 pounds requiring testing of CSUs 30 inches or shorter in height because rulemaking takes time we are urging the industry to take immediate action in the meantime to meaningfully broaden the scope of the Voluntary Standard and strengthen its stability test requirements next I'll talk about safe sleep the US has the highest rate of sudden unexpected infant death or suicide among all developed nations we are committed to preventing these tragedies in February 2018 CR summarized for our readers the results of the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study outlining why progress has stalled in addressing SUED and that parents and what parents can do to keep their babies safe safer past efforts to educate parents and caregivers with respect to safe sleep has not been as effective as hoped cultural and generational beliefs such as it being acceptable or even best for babies to be placed on their stomachs for sleep and that co-sleeping improves bonding between a parent and a baby and is not unsafe indicates that more effective educational methods are needed CR believes that the CPSC working with American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Department of Health and Human Services is well positioned to help coordinate and amplify the effective safe sleep messaging to the public in addition, the risk to infants from padded crib bumpers are severe we agree with the November 2016 joint policy statement by several commissioners that there is a clear risk of injury or death associated with padded crib bumpers and that the parents and caregivers should not use them the continued presence of padded crib bumpers in store shelves and especially in store displays is misleading to consumers and we do not support it in short, the products should not be for sale we support ongoing work at ASTM International to address the hazards that these standards present as well as state and local state and local level efforts to ensure that unsuspecting parents or caregivers do not put their children at risk aftermarket mattresses for certain cribs, play pins and playards are also pose a risk to infants that are inconsistent with ASTM F40615 the voluntary standard for non-full size baby cribs and playards this standard includes the requirement for awarding and striking consumers not to use supplemental mattresses and to only use the original mattress pad the presence of these aftermarket mattresses on the market may also lead to consumer confusion or unsafe sleep we are pleased to see the majority of commissioners vote last year to direct the CPSC staff to initiate rulemaking on section 104 of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act to promulgate mandatory consumer product safety standard that will address the risk of injury associated with the use as well as supplemental and aftermarket mattresses in playards and portable cribs recently baby boxes have increased in popularity these products do not currently meet any relevant safety standard and accordingly we have reminded parents and caregivers that the safest place for baby to sleep is in a crib meeting the CPSC standards the baby box idea may reflect safe sleep principles namely that a bare sleep service is best and parents and caregivers should always place a baby on his or her back but we have cautioned parents and caregivers that using any product that does not meet strong safety standards we encourage CPSC support for the relevant ASTM subcommittees developing standards that would ensure these products are safe toys and magnet sets earlier this year the consumer reports joined with the fellow safety groups in supporting the update for the code regulations so that ASTM F963-17 the newest standard consumer product safety or specification for toy safety should become mandatory toy standard in the United States and recommending that future attention to emerging hazards involving connected toys and new technology also CR published an article on toy safety tips in advance of last year's holiday season CR drew on CPSC data including agency reports, rules and guidelines to help educate consumers about safe gift buying practices the story mentioned a letter we in our partner safety organizations sent supporting the commission stopped sale on high powered magnet sets the story mentioned a letter we in our safety organizations sent supporting the commission stopped sale of high powered magnet sets sold under the brand names and magnets separate from the recommendations CR also wrote specifically about high powered magnet sets particularly those that are marketed as toys and could be dangerous to kids we highlighted CPSC's involvement in the issue including 2014 safety standard and alerted CPSC staff to ensure that manufacturers of assigning we highlighted CPSC's involvement in the issue including 2014 safety standard and alerted CPSC staff to the issue of manufacturers assigning victory age grading information to their products online and on the packaging of the products themselves these products can lead to confusion for parents and caregivers regarding the suitability of these products and high powered magnet sets for children consumer reports or in conclusion consumer reports strongly supports and defense CPSC's critical role this role is important for consumer safety and for the sake of fair marketplace in which companies can actually benefit if they meet their responsibility responsibilities to put consumer safety first in the coming years we look forward to continuing to work with the CPSC and urge the commission to carry out its work in a manner consistent with our shared goal of protecting consumers thank you thank you very much Mr. Huber, Mr. Gregg thank you acting chair Berkel and members of the commission good afternoon my name is Remington A. Gregg and I am counsel for civil justice on behalf of our 400,000 members and supporters thank you for giving us an opportunity to provide recommendations to the commission as you determine the agency's priorities for FY 2019 and 2020 at the outset we express our support for the commission's strategic plan and look forward to working with the commission to continue to ensure continued successful implementation moreover we are committed to working with the commission and our coalition partners on addressing a wide range of issues aggressively addressing well documented product hazards by adopting mandatory standards on table saws and window covering cords hazards related to furniture and TB tip overs and closely monitoring the implementation of the voluntary standards to shield children from dangerous liquid laundry packets I will focus however on two issues that public citizen plans to work closely on with the commission during the next fiscal year including a more data driven agency and increased transparency to effectuate the agency's mission we strongly support the CPSC's goal of using data to become a more efficient and effective agency for consumers and therefore urge the commission to work to continue collecting timely and comprehensive data that will help the agency more effectively advance its mission we also strongly support the consumer product safety database saferproducts.gov we appreciate the commission's commitment to this critically important consumer tool and encourage the commission to enhance its utility if administered correctly and with some small modifications it could far better serve the mission of providing a central national repository of critical product safety information and become a more effective tool to avert death or injury to the public and we are eager to help make this a reality for example we urge the commission to strengthen saferproducts.gov by implementing the recommendations in the saferproducts.gov report issued by consumer federation of America consumers union kids in danger public citizen and us perk in addition CPSC should explore innovative and tech savvy ways to convey information on product recalls this for example might include feedback loops that allow the commission to measure the effectiveness of the information that is disseminated for example the commission could consider agency action that pilots a program that allows consumers at the time of purchase to opt in receiving text messages if a product is recalled then the commission should study whether recall participation was increased because of the notification system as compared to other similar recalls this type of feedback loop would give the CPSC real matrix to understand the number of people who are receiving information on a recall which in turn would help the commission better understand if companies or the agency if in instances of mandatory recalls would fully disseminating critical information about dangerous products to the public on the issue of recall effectiveness we are eager to collaborate with the commission on finding innovative ways to improve the outreach and effectiveness of recalls along with CFA and kids in danger we submitted a list of recommendations to make the workshop productive and impactful such as inviting technology and marketing experts as well as academics to the workshop for their input unfortunately these recommendations were not incorporated into the workshop nor has there been follow up to that meeting other than a recently released report and we're grateful for that report we urged the commission to continue this important conversation by holding additional meetings on the topic as well as by thoughtfully expanding the attendance list for such meetings in the future in order to gain insights from persons with applicable expertise the CPSC should do more to increase transparency in its decision making by improving information disclosure to the public and we placed particular significance on strengthening information disclosures issued pursuant to 6B of Consumer Product Safety Act since the commission issued the NPRM in February 2014 to amend the 30-year old rule implementing section 6B the rule has seen little traction we have supported the rule making's modest proposals to modernize and streamline the regulation and urged the commission to continue with the proposed rulemaking without further delay unfortunately section 6B has restrained the commission in its ability to proactively disclose safety hazards to the public to our knowledge no other federal agency that deals with public health and safety is subject to similar public disclosure restrictions 6B negatively affects consumers by unnecessarily shielding critical product safety information from public view 6B is outdated anti-consumer and intended solely to protect the reputation of businesses that put harmful products on the market there is no legitimate justification for 6B's limits on transparency and Congress should eliminate it we encourage the CPSC to make the case to Congress public citizen intends to do the same until Congress eliminates 6B the commission must prioritize the rulemaking process to increase proactive disclosures by the commission and otherwise update section 6B implementing regulations essentially 6B requires the commission to negotiate every recall announcement with the manufacturer or company all the while people including children are being hurt by dangerous products still allowed on our store shelves public citizen is acutely aware of the CPSC's enormous jurisdictional obligations and the challenges posed by disproportionately modest resources despite this we believe if the commission proceeds with its mandate to prioritize consumer safety above all else including the interests of business and industry that the CPSC can fulfill its decree to advance product safety and protect the lives and health of Americans thank you again for the opportunity to speak this afternoon thank you very much Mr. Gregg Mr. Kensedor thank you acting commissioner Burkle and fellow commissioners for the opportunity to speak to you today about our nation's leading cause of injury and fatalities to the elderly that being false specifically slips and falls my name is Russ Kensedor I'm the president, founder and chairman of the board of the national floor safety institute on behalf of our 15 members of the board and over 2000 members I'd like to speak to you a little bit about our background NFSI was founded in 1997 as a 501C3 charitable organization by myself and several other companies with a single mission and that's to aid in the prevention of slips, trips and falls through education, research and standards development since that time NFSI has grown significantly in fact in 2006 we were awarded the privilege of authoring this nation's standards under the American National Standards Institute or ANSI for slip, trip and fall prevention you see prior to that there were no standards there were no ASTM standards there were no ANSI standards that dealt with slip, trip and fall prevention and so industry was able to say well you can't hold this to a standard that doesn't exist and nonetheless it has impacted our country I come to you today to speak to you regarding four specific recommendations the first is that we ask the CPSC to require floor covering manufacturers to uniformly label and test their products slip resistance to the ANSI B101.5 uniform product labeling standard secondly we ask that you consider expanding surveillance via the NIS system to target same level slips and falls where today that category is generally characterized or categorized as falls we would ask that you consider breaking that down into a separate subsection for same level slips and falls thirdly we would ask that you consider providing slip, trip and fall prevention research funding which could generate some valuable insight as to the cause and effect relationship of slips and falls specifically targeted towards our nations elderly fourth we ask that you consider evaluating the current effectiveness of programs that have been funded and have focused on individual fitness exercise programs like Tai Chi although beneficial we're not certain that they're really making any any real progress as a bit of background in 2015 the NFSI submitted a petition to the CPSC requesting that manufacturers of floor coverings be required to uniformly label their product slip resistance or coefficient of friction per the ANSI B101.5 standard sadly we lost on a vote of two to three but since that time the problem associated with elder falls has reached epidemic levels which brings me here today we're asking that you reconsider our proposal and make elder fall prevention a priority for the 2019 and 2020 agenda NFSI research has revealed that 55% of all same level slips and falls occur as a result of a hazardous slippery walkway floors given such it's estimated that half of all same level floors or falls which take place in the home are the result of a slip and fall currently floor covering manufacturers do not provide consumers any information as it relates to the safety slip resistance of their products which we believe directly contributes to the improper selection and use of certain flooring materials which in turn directly contributes to the same rate of slip and fall injuries accidental falls disproportionately affects the elderly more than any other demographic segment of our society according to the National Safety Council falls were the third leading cause of unintentional injury related deaths in the United States in 2010 the leading cause of unintentional injury related deaths for people over the age of 70 the second leading cause of injury and deaths for individuals between the ages of 64 and 69 in the absence of slip resistance information via a uniform product label the consumer is pretty much on their own when it comes to selecting an appropriate floor for their home to assume that all floors as consumers today do are safe all floors are not safe and come in a wide range of slip resistance values and different coefficient of friction values many of which are simply inappropriate for many Americans and present a high risk for a slip and fall however the consumer again specifically the elderly only finds out they made the wrong choice when they wind up in an emergency room we have to do better the failure by the floor covering industry to consciously chose to not inform the consumer as to their product degree of safety is one of the leading factors as to why so many Americans specifically elderly Americans are finding themselves hurt, injured or sadly expire as a result of the same level slip and fall according to the US Census Bureau approximately 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day look around we're all getting older according to the Harvard University health letter baby boomers have a life expectancy of approximately 81.6 years and many live well beyond 90s into their hundreds the National Safety Council's Injury Facts 2014 editions demonstrated a reveal that over 38 million Americans who sought medical attention due to an unintentional injury over 1,930,000 took place in the home 63,000 Americans died in their home as a result of an unintentional injury and of the estimated $794 billion cost for unintentional injuries and that's a 2012 statistic over 220 billion was spent on injuries which occurred in the home in 2005 over 20,000 of our fellow Americans lost their life as a result of an accidental fall which rose to almost 28,000 in 2014 that was the statistic we used and we submitted our petition to the CPSC the latest data demonstrates in 2017 the number of people who had died went from 27,800 to 33,000 Americans and growing that's a 52% increase over the last decade today the lifetime risk of an accidental death as a result of a fall is nearly equal to that of automobile accidents a 38% increase of those who are most likely impacted are again our nation's elderly over the age of 65 in 2005 there was over 16,400 elderly Americans who lost their life as a result of an accidental fall and again that number has gone up to over 23,000 people in 2014 and over 28,000 28,000 elderly Americans die each year as a result of a fall and we do nothing about it there's no national discussion or agenda according to the national health review again 2011 statistics 42.9% of females and 27.7% of males are the ones who are finding themselves falling and seeking medical attention of the 37,000,000 plus Americans who were injured over 12,000,000 occurred in the home and another almost 7,000,000 occurred outside of the home so this is disproportionately skewed towards the elderly in the home the study revealed that falls in motor vehicle incidents where the leading cause of injury related emergency room visits accounting for 26% and 11% of the total respectively in total about 10.5 million visits to emergency departments in 2010 were due to unintentional falls and nearly 4.5 million 4.5 million were due to motor vehicle accidents which speaks volumes to how well we've done in that campaign of reducing injuries and deaths fatalities in the auto industry and automobile accidents in 2011 falls represented the leading cause of non-fatal injuries requiring emergency room visits sadly since our 2015 petition was denied the slip and fall problem has worsened in 2017 National Safety Council data reveals an increase in fall fatalities according to CDC 2015 data the direct medical cost of older adult falls just the elderly cost of injury medical cost top 34 billion dollars with a population aging both the number of falls and the costs to treat such injuries are again likely to continue to increase we ask the commission to make elder fall prevention a top priority by requiring manufacturers to begin testing and labeling their products to the ANSI B-101.5 labeling standard which is a diagram which you have in our outline looks like a gas gauge showing a needle pointing to a level of slip resistance or traction our proposal is in compliance with the second and fourth goals of the CPSC's 2016 through 2020 strategic plans which calls for preventing hazardous products from reaching consumers not all floors have the same level of slip resistance but how does the consumer know we believe that the consumer that the public has a right to know just how slippery the flooring materials that they seek to buy are this is a request for education understanding it's regulatory but we're asking to simply provide the consumer information as it relates to the flooring products that they're buying that they're exposed to each and every day the ANSI B-101 committee intentionally created the ANSI B-101.5 standard for the intended purpose of informing the public as to the inherent slip risk associated with flooring materials whereby they can make an informed decision as to what product would be appropriate for them we would ask that they avoid floors that are considered low traction per the standard and opt for floors that have a moderate to high traction we're not suggesting that labeling will be the cure to elderfall prevention but it's a first step and it's an important first step in this campaign of preventing injuries our proposed request is similar to that as the government has done for mandating product labeling of food or nutritional labeling which is again a uniform standard label the consumer has the information regarding the contents of the food to make an appropriate buying decision that food product would be appropriate or safe for them to consume so this is a public safety request floor covering manufacturers along with the retail and distribution channels that they use can assist in providing point of purchase materials information explaining the purpose of the product label and encourage consumers to rely upon it as a part of their overall buying decision in short the problem associated with all slips and falls is serious and real and expected to continue to get worse as our elderly population continues to grow since our 2015 petition not a single manufacturer floor covering has begun testing or labeling their products via the uniform testing method or any uniform testing method the floor covering industry continues to ignore the health and safety of the American public and in turn is intentionally exposing our nation's at risk population to the unnecessary risk of a slip and fall and related injuries in their February 2nd 2016 letter to Mr. Kinsey or I apologize but you're about three minutes over I don't know if you're close to the end I'm sorry if you could wrap it up quickly I'm sorry Mr. Frank in the February 2nd 2016 letter to the consumer product safety commission the largest floor covering manufacturer in our country mohawk corporation stated that and this is a quote standards are useless as used by the nation's flooring manufacturers and if the consumer and they found our product labeling confusing and misleading and if the consumer wants to know how safe the floor is we find that to be appalling and again calls for action which we request that the CPSC make elderfall prevention a priority thank you thank you very much Mr. Frank thank you Commissioner Burkle and fellow commissioners for this opportunity to come before you and speak my name is Timothy Frank I'm a consumer and grandfather from Hollywood Maryland you know from my previous testimony this year that my three year old granddaughter Breanna Jones was killed in her home due to a blind court accident in the summer of 2012 this tragic accident has caused untold grief for our children ourselves and our extended family Cristiana and Christopher were both veterans of multiple tours of duty during the war in Iraq this accident became the trigger event for the severe PTSD that resulted in the loss of both of their military careers five years later we all still grieve the loss of our precious extraordinary granddaughter Breanna our lives will never be the same due to this very preventable accident I was very pleased to hear that the window covering industry had finally agreed to new voluntary safety standards and will stop selling stock courted blinds in retail stores and online on December the 15th of this year I applaud the efforts of the consumer product safety commission and you commissioners to make these long overdue changes to the safety standards I'm so thankful for your hard work and your dedication to this effort to try to protect the lives of our young children I'm also thankful that the industry has finally agreed to these new standards but unfortunately custom quarter products will still be available in stores and online and will still be just as deadly for our young children I did a cursory search and discovered that I can order quarter window products for as little as $12.99 on Walmart .com and they are also available online at Lowe's Amazon and many other online stores and according to the department of commerce online sales grew 16% last year and now account for 13% of all retail sales this continued growth of online sales will result in far more sales of window products in the future particularly these quarter products are no longer available in local retail establishments as long as consumers can order quarter products online these new standards will have a limited impact upon the safety of our young children now maybe you were thinking that since only one child died in 2017 as versus one per month in previous years that we don't need a mandatory banning of all quarter products and efforts and product labels are finally working however since there are still millions of these products in homes and hundreds of thousands are still being sold every year how many more children will be killed or severely brain damaged due to these incidents the death of a child is truly heartbreaking and is a tragic loss but just as tragic and perhaps more heartbreaking is a severely brain injured child you see our family also knows firsthand the hardship of that loss our daughter Katie was injured over 30 years ago at age 6 by a drunk driver on Christmas Eve she suffered serious brain damage has cognitive impairment and is now paralyzed on her right side unable to walk without assistance has very limited speech and suffers reoccurring epileptic seizures she has a very hard life sometimes to do we her caregivers especially as we get older the type of brain injury that Katie has is very similar to the type of injury caused by the lack of oxygen that blind court injuries cause in many ways caring for a loved one with this type of injury is like living with an ever present broken foot it is with you always it affects your every hour of daily life all of your dreams and your plans and your hopes for the future of yourself and your children are shattered they are gone forever your lives will never be the same lost in an instant we challenge you to ban these extremely dangerous consumer products not only because they can kill but they can also severely injure young children and shattered the lies of untold thousands of Americans a recently released study pediatric injuries related to window blinds, shades and cords had reported that from 1990 to 2015 there were an estimated 16,827 window blind related injuries among children younger than 6 years of age that were treated in emergency departments in the United States and from 1996 to 2012 we identified 231 window blind cord entanglement incidents among children under 6 and 2 thirds of those entanglement incidents about 155 children that were in that IDI database which wasn't comprehensive of all the children that had died resulted in death the conclusion of this study states that despite existing voluntary safety standards for window blinds these products continue to pose an injury risk to young children and although many of the injuries in this study were non-fatal and resulted in minor injuries cases involving window blind cord entanglements frequently resulted in hospitalization or death a mandatory safety standard that eliminates accessible window blind cords should be adopted my children Christy and Christopher were willing to sacrifice their young family whether they served this last tour in Iraq and even lay down their own lives to keep us as Americans safe and free from terrorism and I say shame on those companies that are unwilling to sacrifice their profits even though their products are killing and maiming our children it is my hope and prayer that none of us will ever have a precious family member killed or horribly injured through a preventable blind cord accident Molly and I and our family urge the Consumer Product Safety Commission to continue working with the window cover industry to enact a mandatory ban on the online and retail sale of all custom and non-custom window cord products that have cords longer than 8.7 inches thank you very much and thank you very much Mr. Frank thank you for being here again this year and with your compelling testimony on the topics of window coverings I do want to say that thanks to many people who are sitting in this room today the agency excuse me the Voluntary Standard for Window Coverings will go into effect at the end of this year which will prevent stack products from being sold with cords both online and in stores the next step in there is to address the custom products which you speak so I do want to publicly thank a lot of folks who have worked so hard on this standard and the progress we've made and that has been made since the last time you sat here so thank you very much for being here and I appreciate your heartfelt testimony it's very compelling thank you Mr. Huber I want to just talk a little bit about the dressers and thank you and thanked Will earlier for what Consumer Reports did and the study you did with regards to tip overs and I asked this question to Will and he deferred to you my question is do you have data or research showing that it's possible that a dresser under 30 inches a clothing storage unit under 30 inches you can make them compliant with a 60 pound weight we do not have data to that effect in our testing we weren't able to show it I thought it was encouraging to see that some of the dressers that you tested you tested to 50 pounds but they passed at 60 pounds and I think that's an indication that manufacturers are going beyond and it is possible to build in the safety feature I just want to talk to you a little bit about baby boxes you talked about safe sleep and we talked this morning with the American Academy of Pediatrics about baby boxes the place we find ourselves in I'm wondering if you've done any testing or you have any information about baby boxes or you've looked at the issue at all now Consumer Reports has not done any testing on baby boxes and the ASTM some committees that are being considered for having responsibility for this product they have not gotten far enough along with what they're doing to do any testing as well should have more on that after the next round of ASTM subcommittee meetings for juvenile products coming up in May Mr. Gregg, thank you for being here because we've heard it from a number of presenters today and I'll ask you the question so saferproducts.gov we've heard it needs to be rejuvenated it needs to have some life breathed into it can you give us some suggestions as to how we can make that site more user friendly and more useful both to you and to us definitely the first thing would be when we can provide you with this saferproducts report that I mentioned earlier I think that is a very good start and one key in that report is improving the information that you ask for because the point is to get more information to help with the analysis to help you do your job better and so more fields more specific information which will help you to guide your decision making more and then making it more user friendly which I don't know if I per say I'm an expert in but I do think that there are plenty of experts within the agency and across the government who can help with that for example there's data.gov which a lot of information already goes on that I think one another important piece could be working with and I believe data.gov is run by I want to say GSA but I might be incorrect on that working to pull some of that information to ensure that information that's on one side is on the other because I do think there's a bit of mismatch between the consumer information that's on one and on the other so ensuring that there is a more complete and accurate picture with both of those agencies ensuring that they're interoperable and they information is on both so I would both of those well I guess two big recommendations our report including more information on cyber products as well as working with the technologists within the government who have much more insight and better knowledge on what is possible to make the information easier to read easier to digest and more helpful. Thank you very much Mr. talked about expanding our nice data to include same level falls are there other data fields are there other data points I should say that we should be asking in that nice data to help kind of clarify the information we're getting through the nice system? Yes actually the system is functional is just so general there's many different forms of falls falls down stairs fall off and so when they're coded it's oftentimes very deceptive or unclear as to how the fall occurred where and what type and I think it would provide valuable insight certainly in light of the growing problem it's such a big number of people we need to do a better job of filtering it out and I would suggest that the nice system focus on same level falls which generally are slips and trips versus falls from an elevation simply break it out into two categories I think you'll find is we have going through the data that most fall related fatalities specifically those in the workplace are falls from elevations that's how most people die as a result of a fall immediately is from an elevation but if you'll get the chronic condition of slips and falls or injuries as a result of a fall that may require an emergency room treatment or nursing home admission generally skewed towards same level slips and falls so I would simply ask that they be split in two falls be categorized as same level or falls from an elevation and so if that distinction is made are there any other data points besides the same level on the falls from an elevation you know that's a good question we get asked that question a lot how many data points are we looking for we collect a lot of independent data from the insurance industry and they're liberty mutual for example in the workplace workers compensation data collection and they have many many different ways the categorized falls it's hard when you compare them even amongst insurance carriers because the coding system is so erratic it's really hard to get a handle what's really going on but we know the problem is getting worse and so I would say just as a starting point without overwhelming everyone just break out the two categories and we can track them very good thank you so much Commissioner Adler thank you Madam Chair Mr. Frank just a couple of thoughts you don't even have to respond although you're more than welcome to first point you make is that we certainly grieve for the lost child but the whole family is the victim and it's so critical that you point that out and in particular I note that you mentioned that your children they've serviced to this country and going off to fight for freedom and I think we all express our gratitude to you to pass on to them and another point you've made and this is always a delicate point to make but I think you made it very eloquently sometimes a horrible severe lifetime injury can be as painful as the loss of a child and thank you for pointing that out in your way for making that vivid to us so again I thank you for that and if you had any response feel free otherwise I would say that in actuality a severely injured child is in many ways far more impactful it's with you always you're dealing with the day-to-day activities and what's going to happen in the future Brianna's been gone five years the family's recovering you have wonderful memories you can see the videos you can see the photos fortunately my daughter just recently conceived and she's now going to have twins and so the family's is static and so that's a wonderful hopefully a life-changing impact in a positive way but when you have that injured child with you it just is with you forever till you're gone and again thank you for making that point so thoughtfully and so impactfully I really appreciate it Mr. Kensior you've done a superb job in pointing out the increasing risk of serious and life-threatening falls to the elderly and I think I've said this before it's an issue that concerns me personally because I now fit into that demographic and when I go to my doctor because I'm over 70 every year they are mandated to say have you had a fall during the past year that shows just how serious the problem is and how important it is to the public health community I should also point out that you've mentioned and I would not say it's a growing demographic the elderly is an exploding demographic and I've said this before but we actually have more people in this country over the age of 65 if you go north to Canada and count every person there we have more people over 65 in this country than they have people in Canada and I also want to be clear about what it is you've asked and you did ask the CPSC to do you did not ask us to mandate the ANSI standard you simply ask us to provide consumers with vital comparative safety information about the risks associated with different floor coverings and I will say my colleague commissioner KNI voted not even necessarily to grant your petition but to study the issue with the thought of turning to section 2070 of the consumer product safety act which permits us to provide comparative information to consumers and I would hope that you're pleased to us would get the commission more interested in looking at the petition I did want to point out that the staff opposed the petition for a variety of reasons and honestly in my dotage I can't remember if you ever wrote a response to the staff briefing package but if you did I'd ask you if you'd share it again otherwise if you didn't could you please share that information with us and I would ask again if you can sort of describe succinctly what the changing injury pattern is for the elderly absolutely in fact after our petition was denied we met with CPSC staff and really had a very good meeting I think much of what resulted in their opposition was based on confusion a lot of confusion was driven by those opponents that commented during public review to create really to create confusion and so we had a very productive meeting and looked to take the recommendations from staff very constructive simplify our petition streamline it and resubmit it we're not asking for mandated regulation we're just asking for information manufacturers can test their products today and label according to their own in-house data we're not mandating anything other than information and in light of I'll do respect Commissioner Adler your demographic is the highest at risk and just for many physiological conditions that exist and so the inherent risk of a slip given a potential physical issue is that much greater that much more impactful that much more expensive and that much more detrimental as you're right it is an explosive population thank you for that and Mr. Huber I can't tell you how thrilled I am to see the director of product safety for consumer reports here I think that's a vital position I'm sure you've been excited that you fill it and you fill it so ably you made an observation about tip over that I think bears repeating you said safety and this is a quote should not rely on consumer skill at anchoring a dresser to the wall and both Commissioner Robinson and Commissioner Kay have made that point you shouldn't be selling a product that is not prepared to be installed but that actually requires a major exercise of skill and dedication and that shouldn't be the case but I did want to ask you about the study that you did and it is a superb study in the current issue of consumer reports consumer reports often does what I call anonymous test you go out and you buy something and I was wondering did you in any part of your study on furniture tip overs have anonymous shoppers go out look to furniture and see whether the salesperson in any way alerted or warned people about the possibility of furniture tip over or pointed out the need to anchor it that may not have been something you study I'm just curious whether you did to my knowledge it's something that we didn't study it's a great question though have any speculation about what the answer might be I certainly have yeah one of the things I can do is go back and talk with the person that's responsible for our shopping anonymous shopping and products and see if they reported back that any of the folks in the stores made comments to them on that subject and I do appreciate your pointing out as several others have done about the fact that we have not solved the problem with magnets and magnet sets and I have to note that one of the criticisms that the 10th circuit made about the commission's decision to issue a regulation was that we didn't spell out the basis of our projection of future injuries because there had been a drop off in sales a dramatic drop off and yet anybody could have told the 10th circuit not that they were listening that the minute that the regulation was invalidated the market would explode and I did note that they didn't testify today but the magnet safety association has acknowledged that magnet sets are being sold in increasing numbers on many internet sites and that puts the whole issue to me in perspective so magnets are back and the number of injuries and fatalities are likely to jump dramatically so I personally hope the commission will revisit the magnet safety issue very soon and I sorry I think I had another question but I don't know what I did with it so I'm just going to turn to Mr. Gregg unless I have time to come back Mr. Gregg you've talked about increasing recall effectiveness which is an important thing by improvements through technical innovations and one of the issues we're going to be addressing on May 16th is the internet of things and so while the internet of things can bring us greater safety it also brings dangers in risks to safety and risks to privacy was your group planning on attending that hearing and do you have any thoughts about how we can expand technical innovation to protect consumers without also putting consumers at risk in jeopardy well number one yes we'll be there to and it is a concern and there is a delicate balance and that's one of the reasons why it's so important to ensure that people who think about these things are at these workshops because the first part of the recall effectiveness workshop definitely should have been what are your concerns how do we and what can we do better but the second part has to be how do we get there and so there have to be we have to talk about that and we have to talk about how do you innovate I mean for example the Federal Trade Commission has a chief technologist I don't think there's any I mean unless he's resigned there's no reason why people who's job it is to think about the intersection of these of the policy shouldn't be at at these events and thinking about I used to work in the White House Office of Science Technology Policy so it was an office designed to bring the entire government to bear on aspects of science and technology there isn't much of an office there anymore but there are but there are people throughout the federal government whose job it is to think about these things and that's why we urge it we have urged and continue to urge the commission to invite those people Thank you very much Commissioner Robinson Frank thank you so much for coming here today and I assume that that's your wife behind you and the smile I saw in the news of the twins so thank you also for bringing your family with you that window coverings is an area that my office has also been very very actively involved in for the last five years and it is an absolutely infuriating process I got very interested in it particularly after a trip to China in 2014 when it was demonstrated to me how very easily and cheaply cordless blinds can be made there is absolutely no reason we can't get rid of cords in blinds and these deaths are just needless strangulation from window cords remains a top five hidden hazard in the home and children who do survive as you know often have lifelong disabilities I just have to tell you that I have watched this process in the Voluntary Standards Committee intimately and first of all our staff I can assure you have just been fantastic they came up with an NPR they've tried to work with industry we have been trying for over 20 years to get industry to do something about these blinds and the process has been so warped I mean the last standard that came out the consumer groups had walked out of the process I even had a meeting with ANSI to the Voluntary Standards Group to say why would you let them ramp on a standard that the consumer groups walked out of the process because it's been so skewed toward these big window blind manufacturers who are making money off of leaving the standard the way it is and I couldn't get any satisfaction from that so when I heard that we had a new standard process going on I was so excited started attending all the meetings and there was a group I have to tell you on that committee I think everyone including our staff was just ecstatic hopeful that finally we were going to get a common sense elegant clean standard that got rid of cords on all blinds that are the kind that are killing kids and instead this same group that had taken over the standard before took over again basically told the rest who had come up with this elegant standard that they weren't going to listen to them and they came up with this absolutely deeply flawed and unenforceable standard of classifying custom and stock and it's frankly I watched the whole process multifamily dwellings are custom products so we're going to have cords in VA housing and we're going to have cords in condos where multiple families are we have no way our staff raised and they're always so much nicer than I am to tell that it's necessary if you're going to work with these guys who are dominating the process but we tried to find some way that at the ports and so many of these are imported especially the corded blinds how we can keep them out when they come to the port and they haven't done that and I have to tell you last week I learned that the version that our chair is singing the praises of so much and we know it's deeply flawed and this was such a missed opportunity we found out that the standard that was passed our staff looked at it and even that standard doesn't incorporate any of the changes that our staff worked so hard on since last July so we have a red line version now hopefully whatever we can get in that we will but the process is so skewed toward the big players that are so dismissive of any consumer complaints that I'm very very troubled on it I am just hoping that since we have they're going to start a new process and supposedly although when they drag their feet for 22 years you don't know what other tricks they're going to come up with but I'm hoping that there will be enough pressure from the members and from the retailers that maybe in this next process very quickly on recall effectiveness you're right Mr. Gradway haven't heard anything from the chair's office follow up from the recall effectiveness workshop but I can tell you that from just observing our recalls there are some things that you don't need any you don't need a recall effectiveness workshop to know that we are not doing right there's just some problems when you look at these numbers that are just abysmal in terms of the recall effectiveness the first thing is the remedies when a remedy is negotiated we're basically letting a company do pretty much what they want to do in terms of what kind of remedy they're going to offer and I firmly believe we're giving them too much power and that we need to be prepared to sue as we finally did in the Britax stroller case although you will note that our chair voted against suing Britax but when a company isn't going to recall a product with the kind of terms that we need to protect consumers we need to be prepared to force them to do that often the remedy that we come up with isn't consumer friendly it might include repairs that the customers have to install or a repair that leaves the product in a condition that you would never have bought it in if that's the condition it was in at the time of purchase and sometimes it requires physically returning an item to a store or other burdensome requirements so our remedies are a problem our communications as I've said this is a political house but our communications are largely from companies they are confusing and opaque and the tricks that companies play on us all the time in terms of communicating recalls has just been such a frustration and we don't call them on it we've had companies that agree to put things on their Facebook page for example putting it on the Facebook page that has 15 million followers they put it on the one that has 12 followers and we let them get away with that and the other area that we could definitely improve is the monitoring of the CPSC recalls frequently once we've got the recall in place we just don't do the kind of monitoring we need to do to see if it's effective because we commissioners have power to redo a recall if it's not effective we just almost never do that and we just let companies get away with they're supposed to file monthly reports sometimes 3, 4, 5 months ago by and they don't file the report and then they don't give us the information they should give us and they're getting away with it and this is exacerbated by the problem that was raised earlier about the FOIA request that we're not responding properly to so there's nobody on the outside able to monitor we're letting the companies get away with it and this has resulted in we're not responding to our recalls so I only encourage you keep pushing us with respect to making our recalls more effective we don't need to study recall rates in order to really see where the problems are in terms of these recalls being effective I loved Nancy Cole's idea in her presentation earlier about a report to Congress on recall rates maybe that has to come from a source other than that would be terrific because we have to have some way that encourages companies to actually properly do their recalls Mr. Kenzier I'm one of them who voted against your petition but it was based on staff's recommendations and in their denial letter I think they listed very specifically why they were why we were denying the petition and I'm glad that you met with them but I encourage you if you think that you have answers to their concerns let us know refile a petition and address the concerns that staff had and I'm sure the commission would be happy to look at it again and thanks to all of you Mr. Huber I didn't ask you any questions but thank you so much for being here today Commissioner Kay Thank you Madam Chair Mr. Huber thank you so much for the work that Consumer Reports did it really made a difference and I think it will be very impactful going forward and the Consumer Reports plan to stay involved in the voluntary standards process Yes we do and do you have a sense of when the next meeting is I believe it's May 4th and can you give me your read on how you see things going how long have you been involved in it about I think about four years now and so what's your read on the current status of it that the manufacturers are very reluctant to change the standard from what it is now they typically are the right way to say this each topic that's being discussed it seems that the manufacturers are very good at finding a way not to come to any conclusion before the meeting is over therefore nothing changes they do cite reasons for why they believe that the standard is sufficient but obviously we disagree with those we think that we need to protect more children especially up to age six and from your perspective are you seeing the leadership from the CPSC's leadership to make a difference I think it's making a little bit of positive difference but if I compared it to CPSC staff participation on juvenile product standards of which I'm very heavily involved as well they're much more involved and have much more influence over what's going on with juvenile products some of that may be because juvenile products fall under rule 104 but regardless of that I still think it would be great if staff could be even more involved with our subcommittee well first you just made a very good plea for the sturdy act because that would give us the same power that we have in the 104 cases of the juvenile of the durable infant goods do you feel like there's more that commission can do absent the staff but the commission itself weighing in to help in the voluntary standards process I'm not sure what you're exactly what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do but certainly any information you know through whatever means that you think would work to get the message out that we need to push this up to covering kids up to age six could definitely have an influence on that subcommittee and I think there's different things we can do directly we can certainly write letters and then we can also put indirect pressure as we've done in other cases like portable generators by moving in NPR and that signals how serious we are about solving the problem ourselves if industry doesn't solve it and there is an A in PR right now for this and if we get beyond it to NPR then yeah we'd be making a move in the right direction thank you again for your work on that Mr. Gregg I just want to thank you as well for your continued shining a spotlight on section 6B of the consumer product safety act I just don't believe that one can credibly claim to be putting safety first and also support that provision I think in the time that I've been here it is by far the most anti-consumer safety and anti-government transparency piece of federal law that I'm aware of especially affecting any health and safety agency I can't see how in any way and Commissioner Adler talked about this earlier with regard to fairness and accuracy I can't see in any way how this has actually benefited consumers and prevented the agency from putting out information that somehow through this process came out faster more accurate and more fair and was more useful from a safety perspective I don't know if you want to add anything else to that yes I would agree and say that I mean this is the reason why we have FOIA and having been a government lawyer I've reviewed my fair share of them and there are tightly focused exemptions for this very reason so it isn't that if 6B was gone that information would just be shared willy nilly you have trade secrets and other ways to keep that information from being released so I think it's particularly powerful that this is a health and safety agency that has basically a double layer of opaqueness when it comes to these issues and so I don't think there is any rationale for it anymore and to go one step further the agency there are simple things the agency can do to make it easier the NPRM is that is one example and I would like to in my comments they are modest proposals they won't change the world so if anyone is thinking that this will make the this will be the end of being able to keep some information from being released it won't but it will do a heck of a lot to get us in the right direction and ensure that transparency and government accountability comes first we've had so much discussion about education campaigns and the importance of educating consumers yet there's not the same support for eliminating this part of the law and that we could be aware of a product that is killing children and we know people are using it and we can't say anything about it or if we wanted to say something about it we would have to go through the very laborious process of notifying the company exactly what we would want to say obviously the more that is likely to impact consumers thinking the more likely the company would disagree and the more likely there would be a lawsuit which would prevent the information from coming out or if they agreed to something going out that was watered down they get the ability to attach a statement to it which pretty much contradict everything we're saying so I can't see in any way how that is helping consumers so I appreciate the work you continue to do on that are you going to submit another petition it sounds like you guys might yes actually we had a very productive meeting with staff they had very good input really they saw much of what we saw they understand the scope of the problem we are going to resubmit a streamline a little bit clearer a little bit more simpler petition it's focused on the same end result which is mandating a product label for informational purposes but it's yeah we'll be back great and I'm also interested in your idea about having some more research done and so actually if you wouldn't mind following up if my office talks to you about that I think that would help us as we look for research projects of things that could be done in this area one of the sad things related to slips and falls as I was once told by the past president of the national safety council you've touched the third rail of safety this is not an area that people like talking about a lot of litigation a lot of financial exposure a lot of the information is really intentionally not shared just due to liability and we respect that we're not encouraging more lawsuits but there are more people getting hurt and sadly they are they are filing lawsuits so we will we'll follow up with your office excellent we look forward to that thank you and Mr. Frank will conclude with you and Mrs. Frank thank you for coming and Katie thank you for coming obviously we've talked about the subject in the past spent a lot of time on this issue I do think as I mentioned earlier there is an inevitability to this issue getting solved which is a positive the frustration is the time at this point and I don't see the reason why we can't just be done with it the solution that came out of the voluntary standards process was to agree to technical changes that would affect only stock products to me that same technical solution whatever that answer is should be applied to custom products I think that if there were the will as soon as tomorrow that could be written in you can have an effective date that could be reasonable but why that can't actually be written in now I have no honest I just don't know I don't understand and so I hope you can continue your advocacy the chairman knows how much this issue has been important to me throughout the years we've worked together I was grateful that she joined me in voting for the ANPR I'm hopeful you'll talk to her about the role that she can continue to play with the voluntary standards group she has a close relationship with industry when they announced that they were coming out with this revised standard she asked them to move up the effective date they instantaneously did that shows the influence that she has and so I hope you'll work with her I think if she put out a very strong call to industry to solve the custom problem tomorrow they would do it and so I think we're close but we need more work and hopefully we can get there sooner rather than later thank you very much no more further questions thank you madam chair thank you again to Mr. Huber, Mr. Gregg, Mr. Kenzie or Mr. Frank for being here today for sharing your time and your expertise and your very compelling stories and experiences to inform the commission so I thank all of you very much we really do greatly appreciate the panel as well as the other three panels for all the information you have shared with us and for taking the time to join us today as a reminder the record will be kept open for one week so for any of the information that may have been requested or any additional information that folks would like to provide to the agency please do so I want to acknowledge for the record that we did receive additional written comments from people who are not able to testify here today those comments were received by the Real Pollock Nelson Independent Safety Consulting, LLC Bob Wilke, President of the Hobby Manufacturers Association Dan Mustico, Vice President Covered in Marketing Affairs of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute Sarah Owen from UL David French, Senior Vice President Cover Relations from the National Retail Federation Kathleen McGwigan, Senior Vice President Retailers Toy Association Linda Kaiser, parents for window blind safety, Chris Lopresti, partner, an attorney, and lastly, James Daly, a child safety advocate. So their testimony, you can be sure, will be reviewed carefully and entered into the record as well. Finally, I want to thank today, this has been a long day for our staff. I want to thank our executive director and her staff, the office of the secretary, the office of facilities, the office of general counsel, and as always, John McGuggan from communications for their efforts to make today's public hearing run as smoothly as it did. Thank you again to all four of our panels, those who submitted written comments and everyone in attendance today, we end our watching online. This concludes the public meeting of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Thank you very much.