http://www.usatoday.com/money/bcovwed.htm
Firestone may have known of trouble in '94
Also, testimony shows execs talked of problems in '97
By James R. Healey, USA TODAY
Bridgestone/Firestone was tracking problems with its Firestone ATX tires as long ago as 1994, documents show, and a recently retired Bridgestone/Firestone official swears in a lawsuit deposition that top executives, including the CEO, were discussing the matter at quarterly meetings, at least since 1997.
In sworn testimony and public statements, Bridgestone/Firestone executives have said the company wasn't aware of potentially fatal tread-separation problems until July, just before the Aug. 9 recall of 6.5 million ATX and Wilderness AT tires. A federal safety probe that began May 2 links Firestone tires to at least 101 deaths in the USA.
The information also challenges Bridgestone/Firestone claims that whatever warning flags existed within the company were cached in the company's finance office, useless to others who might have sounded an alarm.
Bridgestone/Firestone internal documents, submitted as part of four congressional hearings and a safety investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, show concern within the company for years. But when the recall was announced in August, tire company officials said they were reacting to a July analysis of Firestone data by Ford Motor, the biggest user of the recalled tires.
Tread-separation problems "only became apparent this year when we were looking particularly in the July and August time period, doing the analysis, some of which has been referred to here by Ford," Gary Crigger, Bridgestone/Firestone executive vice president, said in testimony Sept.6 before a U.S. Senate subcommittee.
Had Firestone acted sooner, "so many more people, including my son, would still be alive," says Vickie Hendricks of Corpus Christi, Texas. Her son Matthew, 18, died January 1998 when his Ford Explorer rolled over four times after the tread peeled from the left rear Firestone ATX tire . The tire is among those recalled.
An indication that tread separation was widely discussed at Bridgestone/Firestone comes in a Friday deposition of Robert Martin, who retired as vice president of quality assurance in May and is employed by the company on special projects.
Martin said in the deposition that claims data showing tread-separation problems were presented to most departments and to Masatoshi Ono, CEO and chairman of U.S. operations and executive vice president of Japan parent Bridgestone .
Claims refer to money paid for property damage and personal injury caused when tires fail. That's different from money spent on warranties.
Martin: "The only place the claims data (were) ever discussed was in the sales CEO meeting." He described that as a gathering at least quarterly of "the senior management group, and you had the financial group, you had the planning group. The quality group. Sometimes PR, marketing."
Asked by Tampa attorney Omar Medina whether Ono attended discussions of the claims data, Martin, who said he was not at all of the meetings, replied, "Yes, sir." Asked whether Ono attended between '97 and '99, Martin said, "I'm sure he did." Medina, summarizing, said to Martin: "You said that beginning in about 1997, 1998, the discussion regarding these tread-belt separations and the claims data became more frequent at these meetings."
"That's correct," Martin responded.
Martin, reached at his home in Brentwood, Tenn., Tuesday, said, "There's more to it than that. They didn't ask me why these tires separate. I'm not prepared to say there were tread separations. You guys get this all out of context. I don't appreciate you having my deposition, and I'm not going to talk to you."
Medina is suing Bridgestone/Firestone and Ford on behalf of the estate of Kelli Gillmore. The Texas woman died June 4, 1999, when the tread separated from the left rear Firestone ATX tire on her 1996 Ford Explorer, which left the road and overturned, also injuring her two young children.
Bridgestone/Firestone spokeswoman Anitra Budd discounted the importance of the claims discussions Martin cited. She said there was no meeting solely about tread-separation claims. The topic "would have come up in discussion in various meetings, but it wasn't where it was (the main) topic of discussion."
At a U.S. House subcommittee hearing Sept. 6 chaired by Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., asked, "When did the red flag go up with Firestone/Bridgestone?"
Robert Wyant, the man who replaced Martin as Bridgestone/Firestone vice president for quality assurance, replied, "The decision was made on Aug. 8, and the announcement was made on Aug. 9."
Crigger, the executive vice president, told the same subcommittee that the company acted as soon as it knew. "Only after we got into this in more depth, certainly after we saw claims, particularly the serious injury claims mounting this year, did we begin to collect information of all kinds. And, yes, we analyzed, along with Ford, information associated with the claims."
Bridgestone/Firestone did not respond to a request to talk with executives.
Ford Motor was Firestone's biggest customer, fitting the tires that now have been recalled as standard equipment on millions of Ford Explorer and Mercury Mountaineer sport-utility vehicles. Ford analyzed the tire company's data in July.
Information from the deposition drew an angry response from one congresswoman Tuesday.
"I consider it to be more evidence that much earlier than this summer they knew they had a serious problem, and they were not forthcoming with the facts," said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M. Two people and their unborn baby died in her district in a May Firestone-related accident, and she was an aggressive subcommittee questioner. "They are not being forthcoming with what they knew and when they knew it. They were not thinking about it from a public safety point of view, which they should have done."
Tauzin allowed that "people who testified may not have had personal knowledge." But he added, "I'm convinced that someone at Firestone knew, and I'm very suspicious that someone at Ford knew. They knew they had a problem, and they tried to fix it. But they never informed anyone so lives could be saved."
The document that dates the company's information to 1994 is among Firestone internal papers submitted as part of NHTSA's probe into whether the recall should include other types and sizes of tires.
That document is an analysis of which light-truck tires were causing the most property damage and personal injury when the tires failed.
The document shows that the number of claims for reimbursement involving ATX tires zoomed to 76 in 1994, accounting for 43% of the claims among light-truck tires. That was up from 19 ATX claims in 1993, representing 13% of the total that year.
And the jump was not an isolated spike, yearly Firestone analyses through 1999 show. From 1994 on, ATX continued to be over-represented in the company's light-truck-tire liability claims, eventually accounting for more than half.
"They had to have known, and they totally disregarded all the statistics they had," says Irene Dickson of Carson, Okla. She sued Firestone in 1995 over tread separation after her husband, James, and grandson Cody, 6, were killed June 10, 1994 . The tread came off the left rear ATX tire on his Explorer , and the SUV crashed.
Preparing the lawsuit, her lawyer discovered at least a dozen other lawsuits and accident reports involving Firestone tread separation. "They had to have known the tire-manufacturing process was extremely lacking, but even after that, nothing was done to correct it," Dickson says. She also blames Ford, claiming the Explorer is unstable.
Lawsuits, liability claims and accident reports were considered beside the point, Crigger told Congress: "Claims and lawsuits are not considered to be representative throughout a line. They are considered to be individual cases that occur for a variety of reasons. So they have never been part of performance evaluation.
"As I said earlier, I wish they had (been) here, because that's the part of the analysis that turned us into looking at this particular problem and taking the action that we did."
Claims and lawsuits are irrelevant, agreed Bridgestone/Firestone Vice President John Lampe at a congressional subcommittee hearing Sept. 21. "We've used and had access to that claims data for a number of years," he said. But, "We've never used it as a performance measure for tires."
The executives said a valid yardstick is warranty claims, known as adjustments. Those showed no problem, they have said.
Also showing concerns dating back to 1996:
An unlabeled chart among the documents Firestone submitted to NHTSA is an examination of tread-belt-separation problems by production year "through 8/15/96." It includes handwritten notes that the return rate for tires built at Firestone's Decatur, Ill., factory in 1995 and '96 "looks bad" on tires identified as LT235/75R-15, even though it had improved from tires built there in 1991 through '94. Decatur is the source of many of the bad tires.
On the same page, another handwritten note concerning LT265/75R-16 tires says the tread-separation problem "is really bad."
Bridgestone/Firestone says it does not know who wrote those remarks.
In 1996, Bridgestone/Firestone sent engineers to inspect tires after the Arizona Game and Fish Department complained in a letter about tread separations in its fleet of about 400 vehicles. Bridgestone/Firestone wrote back in 1997 that there were no safety defects, even though the inspection found "three tires had the top belt coming away from the bottom belt," and Firestone was "not able to determine the core cause of this detachment."
Two 1999 memos, dated March 11 and April 13, discuss adjustments involving tread separation on tires like those recalled, as well as other sizes of those tires, in the New Jersey, Chicago and Dallas regions. Firestone's Akron, Ohio, lab evaluated the problem and "confirmed the presence of 'bubbles' in the shoulder area inside the tire and a separation between the top of the wedge and the bottom of the No. 2 belt,'" B.V. Halverson wrote to Martin.
Bridgestone/Firestone spokeswoman Anne Conrad said the finding was insignificant. "They said, yes, they had seen those bubbles, but it was in accordance with the way the tires were tested."
Another 1999 Firestone document, labeled "critical performance issues" and prepared for an October quarterly meeting of its engineers who investigate such matters, noted that tread separations among light-truck tires like those involved in the recall were up 18.6% from a year earlier. The same page includes the comment: "Need more improvement." Another page shows that separation adjustments specifically for ATX tires were up 5.2%, while adjustments for other common problems were down 4.1% to 4.8%.
Spokeswoman Budd said, "Everybody from different regions comes in and shares information. They (are the engineers who) do the testing and tire-adjustment inspections."
The recall, the explanations, the testimony are so much chaff to Shawna Fruecht of Naples, Fla. She survived a July 2 rollover after the tread peeled off a rear tire on her 1998 Explorer. She says she still suffers physical problems and nightmares.
She blames Ford and Firestone for failing to sound the alarm. "Somebody who has a billion-dollar bonus on the line will lie to keep it."
Contributing: Greg Farrell, Earle Eldridge, Del Jones, Sara Nathan, Thomas A. Fogarty and Barbara Hansen
Firestone may have known of trouble in '94
Also, testimony shows execs talked of problems in '97
By James R. Healey, USA TODAY
Bridgestone/Firestone was tracking problems with its Firestone ATX tires as long ago as 1994, documents show, and a recently retired Bridgestone/Firestone official swears in a lawsuit deposition that top executives, including the CEO, were discussing the matter at quarterly meetings, at least since 1997.
In sworn testimony and public statements, Bridgestone/Firestone executives have said the company wasn't aware of potentially fatal tread-separation problems until July, just before the Aug. 9 recall of 6.5 million ATX and Wilderness AT tires. A federal safety probe that began May 2 links Firestone tires to at least 101 deaths in the USA.
The information also challenges Bridgestone/Firestone claims that whatever warning flags existed within the company were cached in the company's finance office, useless to others who might have sounded an alarm.
Bridgestone/Firestone internal documents, submitted as part of four congressional hearings and a safety investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, show concern within the company for years. But when the recall was announced in August, tire company officials said they were reacting to a July analysis of Firestone data by Ford Motor, the biggest user of the recalled tires.
Tread-separation problems "only became apparent this year when we were looking particularly in the July and August time period, doing the analysis, some of which has been referred to here by Ford," Gary Crigger, Bridgestone/Firestone executive vice president, said in testimony Sept.6 before a U.S. Senate subcommittee.
Had Firestone acted sooner, "so many more people, including my son, would still be alive," says Vickie Hendricks of Corpus Christi, Texas. Her son Matthew, 18, died January 1998 when his Ford Explorer rolled over four times after the tread peeled from the left rear Firestone ATX tire . The tire is among those recalled.
An indication that tread separation was widely discussed at Bridgestone/Firestone comes in a Friday deposition of Robert Martin, who retired as vice president of quality assurance in May and is employed by the company on special projects.
Martin said in the deposition that claims data showing tread-separation problems were presented to most departments and to Masatoshi Ono, CEO and chairman of U.S. operations and executive vice president of Japan parent Bridgestone .
Claims refer to money paid for property damage and personal injury caused when tires fail. That's different from money spent on warranties.
Martin: "The only place the claims data (were) ever discussed was in the sales CEO meeting." He described that as a gathering at least quarterly of "the senior management group, and you had the financial group, you had the planning group. The quality group. Sometimes PR, marketing."
Asked by Tampa attorney Omar Medina whether Ono attended discussions of the claims data, Martin, who said he was not at all of the meetings, replied, "Yes, sir." Asked whether Ono attended between '97 and '99, Martin said, "I'm sure he did." Medina, summarizing, said to Martin: "You said that beginning in about 1997, 1998, the discussion regarding these tread-belt separations and the claims data became more frequent at these meetings."
"That's correct," Martin responded.
Martin, reached at his home in Brentwood, Tenn., Tuesday, said, "There's more to it than that. They didn't ask me why these tires separate. I'm not prepared to say there were tread separations. You guys get this all out of context. I don't appreciate you having my deposition, and I'm not going to talk to you."
Medina is suing Bridgestone/Firestone and Ford on behalf of the estate of Kelli Gillmore. The Texas woman died June 4, 1999, when the tread separated from the left rear Firestone ATX tire on her 1996 Ford Explorer, which left the road and overturned, also injuring her two young children.
Bridgestone/Firestone spokeswoman Anitra Budd discounted the importance of the claims discussions Martin cited. She said there was no meeting solely about tread-separation claims. The topic "would have come up in discussion in various meetings, but it wasn't where it was (the main) topic of discussion."
At a U.S. House subcommittee hearing Sept. 6 chaired by Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., asked, "When did the red flag go up with Firestone/Bridgestone?"
Robert Wyant, the man who replaced Martin as Bridgestone/Firestone vice president for quality assurance, replied, "The decision was made on Aug. 8, and the announcement was made on Aug. 9."
Crigger, the executive vice president, told the same subcommittee that the company acted as soon as it knew. "Only after we got into this in more depth, certainly after we saw claims, particularly the serious injury claims mounting this year, did we begin to collect information of all kinds. And, yes, we analyzed, along with Ford, information associated with the claims."
Bridgestone/Firestone did not respond to a request to talk with executives.
Ford Motor was Firestone's biggest customer, fitting the tires that now have been recalled as standard equipment on millions of Ford Explorer and Mercury Mountaineer sport-utility vehicles. Ford analyzed the tire company's data in July.
Information from the deposition drew an angry response from one congresswoman Tuesday.
"I consider it to be more evidence that much earlier than this summer they knew they had a serious problem, and they were not forthcoming with the facts," said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M. Two people and their unborn baby died in her district in a May Firestone-related accident, and she was an aggressive subcommittee questioner. "They are not being forthcoming with what they knew and when they knew it. They were not thinking about it from a public safety point of view, which they should have done."
Tauzin allowed that "people who testified may not have had personal knowledge." But he added, "I'm convinced that someone at Firestone knew, and I'm very suspicious that someone at Ford knew. They knew they had a problem, and they tried to fix it. But they never informed anyone so lives could be saved."
The document that dates the company's information to 1994 is among Firestone internal papers submitted as part of NHTSA's probe into whether the recall should include other types and sizes of tires.
That document is an analysis of which light-truck tires were causing the most property damage and personal injury when the tires failed.
The document shows that the number of claims for reimbursement involving ATX tires zoomed to 76 in 1994, accounting for 43% of the claims among light-truck tires. That was up from 19 ATX claims in 1993, representing 13% of the total that year.
And the jump was not an isolated spike, yearly Firestone analyses through 1999 show. From 1994 on, ATX continued to be over-represented in the company's light-truck-tire liability claims, eventually accounting for more than half.
"They had to have known, and they totally disregarded all the statistics they had," says Irene Dickson of Carson, Okla. She sued Firestone in 1995 over tread separation after her husband, James, and grandson Cody, 6, were killed June 10, 1994 . The tread came off the left rear ATX tire on his Explorer , and the SUV crashed.
Preparing the lawsuit, her lawyer discovered at least a dozen other lawsuits and accident reports involving Firestone tread separation. "They had to have known the tire-manufacturing process was extremely lacking, but even after that, nothing was done to correct it," Dickson says. She also blames Ford, claiming the Explorer is unstable.
Lawsuits, liability claims and accident reports were considered beside the point, Crigger told Congress: "Claims and lawsuits are not considered to be representative throughout a line. They are considered to be individual cases that occur for a variety of reasons. So they have never been part of performance evaluation.
"As I said earlier, I wish they had (been) here, because that's the part of the analysis that turned us into looking at this particular problem and taking the action that we did."
Claims and lawsuits are irrelevant, agreed Bridgestone/Firestone Vice President John Lampe at a congressional subcommittee hearing Sept. 21. "We've used and had access to that claims data for a number of years," he said. But, "We've never used it as a performance measure for tires."
The executives said a valid yardstick is warranty claims, known as adjustments. Those showed no problem, they have said.
Also showing concerns dating back to 1996:
An unlabeled chart among the documents Firestone submitted to NHTSA is an examination of tread-belt-separation problems by production year "through 8/15/96." It includes handwritten notes that the return rate for tires built at Firestone's Decatur, Ill., factory in 1995 and '96 "looks bad" on tires identified as LT235/75R-15, even though it had improved from tires built there in 1991 through '94. Decatur is the source of many of the bad tires.
On the same page, another handwritten note concerning LT265/75R-16 tires says the tread-separation problem "is really bad."
Bridgestone/Firestone says it does not know who wrote those remarks.
In 1996, Bridgestone/Firestone sent engineers to inspect tires after the Arizona Game and Fish Department complained in a letter about tread separations in its fleet of about 400 vehicles. Bridgestone/Firestone wrote back in 1997 that there were no safety defects, even though the inspection found "three tires had the top belt coming away from the bottom belt," and Firestone was "not able to determine the core cause of this detachment."
Two 1999 memos, dated March 11 and April 13, discuss adjustments involving tread separation on tires like those recalled, as well as other sizes of those tires, in the New Jersey, Chicago and Dallas regions. Firestone's Akron, Ohio, lab evaluated the problem and "confirmed the presence of 'bubbles' in the shoulder area inside the tire and a separation between the top of the wedge and the bottom of the No. 2 belt,'" B.V. Halverson wrote to Martin.
Bridgestone/Firestone spokeswoman Anne Conrad said the finding was insignificant. "They said, yes, they had seen those bubbles, but it was in accordance with the way the tires were tested."
Another 1999 Firestone document, labeled "critical performance issues" and prepared for an October quarterly meeting of its engineers who investigate such matters, noted that tread separations among light-truck tires like those involved in the recall were up 18.6% from a year earlier. The same page includes the comment: "Need more improvement." Another page shows that separation adjustments specifically for ATX tires were up 5.2%, while adjustments for other common problems were down 4.1% to 4.8%.
Spokeswoman Budd said, "Everybody from different regions comes in and shares information. They (are the engineers who) do the testing and tire-adjustment inspections."
The recall, the explanations, the testimony are so much chaff to Shawna Fruecht of Naples, Fla. She survived a July 2 rollover after the tread peeled off a rear tire on her 1998 Explorer. She says she still suffers physical problems and nightmares.
She blames Ford and Firestone for failing to sound the alarm. "Somebody who has a billion-dollar bonus on the line will lie to keep it."
Contributing: Greg Farrell, Earle Eldridge, Del Jones, Sara Nathan, Thomas A. Fogarty and Barbara Hansen
