Garage Door- A Danger for Children

Being extremely heavy and usually automatic makes the garage doors highly hazardous. Usually, children fantasize playing in garage doors and consider it a stunt to run through the garage door before it closes. This leads to getting trapped inside the garage and sometimes while darting under the door, children can lead to crushing of their fingers or any other body part. This can be very hazardous but these risks can be avoided if children are given the awareness, required for their own safety.

In the past three decades, the number of accidents which lead to the death children ranged to above sixty. Usually, the victims are toddlers or children in early teens. The fault could partly be assigned to older models of garage doors, which do not reverse once it hits an object. Apart from that, the springs and other mechanisms are very forceful and can seriously cut off fingers. Some kids also died due to being trapped in the garages.

Due to the rising number of accidents, garage door openers were redesigned so as to reduce the risks. This time the garage doors were equipped with a sensor which would sense if any object came in the way of the door while opening closing or any movement. Moreover, the buttons to open the door were also refigured and this time, a person would have to keep the button pressed until the door closes. Wherever, the person frees the button the door would stop, whether that be in the middle or the closing point. These changes in garage door systems, has seriously lead to a sharp decline in hazards involving children.

But, as the garage doors are a manmade creation, they are open to flaws. Usually, installing the sensor in the wrong manner or at the wrong position can lead to no contribution being made to reducing accidents. One such situation could be if you have installed the sensor at the height of around two feet. Well, this sensor of yours would not detect a small child of less than two feet and so chances of accidents are not reduced. So, you should try installing your sensor at a lower height so that it can detect small children as well as adults.

Well, even if it is not just your installation error, it could be that, there were mechanical failures, which would lead to the reverse mechanism failure. Now, this could trap the children in the garage door or being crushed under the door. So, to avoid this risk, you should perform tests and inspections at regular intervals, to see if everything is intact and functional. Also, in case your door sticks or drags, you should immediately get it checked.

The best way to avoid types of accidents is to educate the children and make them aware of the possible dangers. Try keeping children out of the garage area when not supervised and do not let them play around with the remote control.