ACCIDENT VICTIM STRESSES SAFETY-BELT USE

Jeff Harms knows what a seat belt can prevent. In his case it would have kept him from being in a coma for 19 days after his brain crashed into his skull.

Harms, of Cape Girardeau, said he arrived dead on arrival at a Columbia hospital June 21, 1986, after his Chevrolet Corvette turned over twice, ejecting him. He was 27, cruising on the first day of summer, and he was drunk.

"What I want to say is, I know I was wrong to drink and drive," Harms said Wednesday. "I learned a very painful lesson: you should not drink and drive and you should buckle your seat belt; you should always buckle your seat belt."

Harms spoke to about 70 people Wednesday at a Traffic Safety Challenge regional workshop in Cape Girardeau. Held at Holiday Inn, the workshop drew representatives of law enforcement and hospitals, emergency medical personnel, and others.

The workshop included presentations and speakers on safety-belt and child-safety-seat use, designated driver programs, the state's driving while intoxicated law, sobriety checkpoints, and a local head- and spinal-cord-injury prevention program. The workshop was held to show how deaths and injuries and economic loss from traffic accidents can be reduced.

It is one of 16 regional workshops being held around the state that are sponsored by the Missouri Safety Council Coalition for Safety Belt Use and the Missouri Department of Public Safety's Division of Highway Safety. The first was held Monday in Farmington; the last is scheduled for March 2 in Columbia.

Harms said the wreck occurred when his car hit a bad spot on the road. He had the car's T-tops off and was thrown out, he said. He received a closed head injury and fractured his neck in five places, he said.

He said he believed the coma was from his brain slamming against his skull when he was thrown from the car. He held up a color picture of the car, which showed a red, smashed-in vehicle.

Due to him having a feeding tube inserted through his nose and into his throat, he said, his vocal chords were stretched out and he had to go through speech therapy.

Harms told his story with a mix of forthright seriousness and humor. At one point he held up a picture of him with the feeding tube inserted. Saying he couldn't recall if the picture was taken in the morning or later in the day, he said: "I can see steak going through the tube. What I can't figure out is if it's with eggs or potatoes."

An Army veteran, Harms said he had piloted a Cobra helicopter gunship, and the first thing that was dealt with on the pre-flight checklist was hooking up the seat belt and shoulder harness.

"I wish I would have had mine on that day because it would have saved me a lot of pain," he said of the day of his wreck.

And it wasn't only painful for him, he said. His family, he said, which included a brother and sister he didn't remember after the wreck, also pained to see him in his coma.

George Grazier, a spokesman for "Operation Buckle Down," told the gathering that the goal is to get 70 percent of motorists in Missouri to buckle up by the end of 1992. The risk from traffic accidents is great, he said.

In 1990, he said, one in 29 people faced the possibility of being involved in a traffic accident in Missouri, and one in 68 faced the possibility of being killed or injured. There were 171,000 traffic accidents that year in Missouri, he said.

Across the nation in 1989, he said, a person was killed in a traffic accident every 11 minutes.

Grazier encouraged police officers to buckle up also. Officers can expect to be in 35.2 accidents per million miles driven, he said.

"So, police officers, the first thing we need to do is make sure you're buckled up. You take the message. You're the role model."

Later, Grazier told a reporter that 158 officers were killed in the line of duty in 1990 across the nation. A third of them died in traffic accidents, he said.

Arvid E. West Jr., director of the Missouri Division of Highway Safety, told the group that if there are people in the area who don't want to wear their seat belts, and they want someone to talk to them, he'll do it.

"These cotton-pickin' things are built into the cars we drive. They're free, and even if you're as uncoordinated as me, you can put them on," he said.