Air Bags and First-Responder Safety

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Modern vehicles are equipped with multiple air bags designed to offer supplementary protection to belted occupants in the event of frontal, side and rollover crashes. Front air bags for both the driver (mounted in the steering wheel) and right-front passenger (mounted in the instrument panel) are the norm for late-model vehicles. Side air bags are becoming increasingly common. These can be torso bags or combination head and torso bags (mounted in the side door or seat back), head curtains and inflatable tubes (mounted in the roof side rail). A small number of vehicles are equipped with knee-bolster air bag systems. Many new vehicles are also equipped with pyrotechnic seat belt pre-tensioners which may be located in the buckle or in the emergency locking retractor. By design, air bags and seat-belt pre-tensioners may not deploy in crashes below a certain severity threshold, or where the nature of the collision does not warrant deployment. For example, front air bags may not be deployed in a side impact and, conversely, side air bags may not deploy in frontal crashes. A left side air bag will normally not be deployed in a right-side impact and vice-versa. Rear-end collisions may not result in deployment of any air bags. Rollovers may result in only deployment of side curtain systems. In addition, advanced air bag systems may have occupant presence and/or occupant position sensors that, in a given collision situation, suppress deployment of one or more air bags while other air bags are deployed. Seat-belt pre-tensioners may not be fired if there is no occupant present (e.g. a right-front passenger) or if an occupant (driver or passenger) is unbelted. The algorithms by which deployment decisions are made are very complex, reflecting the wide range of collision types and occupant situations prevalent in real-world situations. In consequence, emergency rescue personnel, including police officers, ambulance crews, and fire fighters, and recovery personnel conducting towing operations, should be aware of the potential for injury through inadvertent actuation of undeployed pyrotechnic systems in collision-involved vehicles. The nature of these devices is that they are deployed extremely rapidly such that inadvertent deployment may result in injury to individuals in close proximity. In particular, air bags have been found to cause serious, and even fatal, injuries to motor-vehicle occupants in collisions. There has been at least one documented report of a fire fighter being injured as a result of a post-collision deployment of a front air bag on the passenger side of a vehicle. This page is provided by the Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals as an initial source of information on this subject. For specific information on any particular vehicle, the reader should contact the vehicle's manufacturer. Emergency Response Guides* NHTSA's Emergency Rescue Guidelines for Air Bag Equipped Vehicles (192 KB PDF) BMW Group - Rescue Manual (2.6 MB PDF) Air Bags and Pretensioners in GM Vehicles (323 KB PDF) Lexus RX 400h - Emergency Response Guide (2 MB PDF) Toyota Prius - Emergency Response Guide * For more information, or for vehicles that are not listed here, contact the specific vehicle manufacturer.   See also our associated page on: Hybrid Vehicles and First-Responder Safety

The information on this page has been developed in collaboration with our traffic safety partners at the Road Safety and Motor Vehicle Regulation Directorate, Transport Canada