Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues impacting you this week. Here's Ryan Gorman. Thanks for joining us here on iHeartRadio Communities. I'm Ryan Gorman, and we have a few important conversations lined up
for you for this show. In just a bit, we'll check in with the Acting Administrator for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to discuss Child Passengers Safety Week and the latest data on traffic crashes and traffic fatalities across the country. But right now, to get things started, I'm joined by Trevor Riggan, President of Humanitarian Services at the American Red Cross, to talk about the relief services they provide following major disasters and a whole lot more. Trevor, thanks
so much for coming on the show. And before we get to everything having to do with relief services, let's start with an issue that's been in the news recently, the American Red Crosses declaration that we have a critically low supply of blood donations throughout the US right now, what can you tell us about
that? So we have seen a twenty five percent decrease in the amount of blood we have on our shelves just in the last few weeks, since early October, since early August, and that reduction puts so much at risk for families who need blood and individual who need blood all across the country. So there is a desperate need to make sure that people make donations, that they make those appointments and keep those appointments to make sure we have a safe and
stable blood supply all across the country. As you mentioned, there is a tie end to the climate crisis and the disaster you've been seeing. Last year, we saw a twenty three percent increase in the number of canceled blood drives through the severe weather and climate emergencies all across the country. So that means it's even more important that we get new blood donors and stable blood donnors that can come back time and time again and make sure people have the blood that
they need. Can you elaborate on the American Red Crosses roll in blood donations and keeping our national blood supply at the levels it needs to be stained at. So the Medicanrand Cross provides almost forty percent of the nation's blood supply, and so that includes recruiting the donors, engaging the dotor, collecting the blood, testing the blood and then providing it to hospitals both ahead of time every single day, but also an urgent needs when you need what they collect stad
order where they need blood urgently for a surgery or an accident. And so we have both the collection efforts, more than twelve hundred blood drives every single day across the country happening, and we also have hundreds of volunteers every day ready to go to deliver blood to hospitals just in time to save lives. You can learn more about the blood donation work the American Red Cross does at
red Cross Blood dot org. That's Red Cross Blood dot org And Trevor, this isn't the first time that we've seen a shortage like this, right, I remember seeing something similar happening during the pandemic because of the logistical issues caused by COVID nineteen making it hard for people to donate and making it difficult to put on those different blood drives that we constantly see throughout the country, especially
at the onset of the pandemic where people were rightfully so cautious to come into closed facilities and we're learning how to live in in a pandemic environment. We saw a drastic reduction in the number of people that came forward. And you know, the American public always respect seems to respond to urgent cries for help, and we're trusting that the same will happen today with a surgeon need for blood. We saw that happening back during the pandemic. We saw our numbers
go back up. We're hoping that they'll respond possibly here today as well. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by Trevor Riggan, President of Humanitarian Services at the
American Red Cross. You can learn more at red Cross dot org. So before we dive into the work the American Red Cross does with relief services following natural disasters, can you give us a broad overview of the mission of the American Red Cross and in all that your organization does on a day to day basis, because it encompasses a wide range of different programs and services, so
I can give the broad pictures. So obviously, we have our work to keep a forty percent of the nation's blood supply safe and available for people that need it. We also have something we call training services, and that's providing life saving training to millions of people every year. First Day CPR. That's a huge part of the Red Cross mission. Our disaster relief services. We
respond to nearly sixty thousand disasters a year. The majority of those are actually house fires, So we have volunteers on standby twenty four to seven a days, responding to almost two hundred disasters every single day, all across the countries,
all across the country. We have our work with the military. We provide frontline support to both active duty military and their families back at home, making sure they can get emergency communications back and forth the loved ones, but also providing supports of veterans and wounded warriors and hospitals and communities all across the country. And then our work to engage volunteers, so we provide an outlet
to the people who want to give, who want to serve. We have tens of thousands of volunteers every year who step forward to serve in each of those lines of service and make sure the communities get the help they need when crisis happen. So September is National Preparedness Month, and we have seen a number of major disasters just in the past couple of months, let alone in
twenty twenty three. Tell us more about the relief services you provide. So the Red Cross responds to every disaster that happens, and the range is incredible, and the frequency is what's most troubling. Recently, just in the last ten years, we've seen in Dublin and the number of climate driven disasters the American recross responding to. And in the first half of twenty twenty three, the United States actually saw a record twenty three different billion dollars disasters, disasters
that cause more than a billion dollars in insured loss. And this includes atmospheric rivers in California, deadly tornadoes in South and Midwest, the extreme heat effects we've seen in almost every community across the country. And even now we're preparing for more. We still have over two thousand volunteers and staff and communities all across the country responding to the deadly wildfires in Hawaii, the effects of the hurricane of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, the once in a hundred year
flood in Vermont. The need is constant. The need is constant. Disasters have become a true chronic issue and a true humanitarian crisis in our country. Our range of services range from making sure that shelters are open, that people have a safe place to go to meals to eat services those shelters, We
provide health and mental health support to those families. We also provide casework services and long term recovery supports the families to make sure they have a passed forward in that incredibly complex and long journey to get back to where they started. The response. Depending on the disaster itself, does that change at all. If you're dealing with let's say, the deadly and devastating wildfires in Maui can here to our hurricane in the southeastern portion of the United States, it does.
Our service can be very customized based on the disaster and based on the impact that communities are facing. So fatalities are a common thread on many of these devastating climate events, and we treat fatalities very differently. We have very highly trained teams that do community support. We set up centers where families can come who are looking for the loved ones, where we can connect them with services and government agencies to help them navigate the complex process of how to identify
if their lovel one is lost or not. We have different levels of financial assistance and services for those families mental health support to help them move through that process, which is very different than the immediacy of an evacuation, where really our focuses on sheltering and making sure people have a safe place to go in a place to start to build a recovery from How much of a strain has been put on your organization the American Red Cross the past couple of years,
because I know, the pandemic was an extremely busy time. There were all kinds of different issues there, and then there was also a period where it was tough for people to donate because of the financial situation they were dealing with in this country. Now we have a year where we're seeing all of these different natural disasters. It just seems like it's one thing on top of another.
It has been an incredibly challenging years, and we have been really we're racing to both adapt our mission and grow our capacity to take that on. So every single day we are adapting how we serve, creating more services and tools, really focused right now on having equa moore response, being able to better identify communities that need us the most so the help can get to them first. We're using a lot of technology and data analysis, even artificial intelligence
to help us better understand how to serve those that need us. We're also working very quickly to grow our capacity. All of those needs you just spoke to really are about this. Redcross needs to be stronger. We need to
have volunteers in the communities that need us the most. We need to have the local partners that are connected to us, but before and after disaster strikes, and then we need more employees, which we're adding to our workforce every single day to make sure the Red Cross can be there for what has become just an acceleration of events. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by Trevor Riggan, President of Humanitarian Services at the American Red Cross. You can learn more at
Redcross dot org. Again, that's Redcross dot org. So obviously, in order to accomplish everything you do, and we spend some time covering the wide range of services and programs you provide, you need a lot of different things to make that happen, including volunteers. So let's start there. What are some different ways that people can volunteer to help the American Red Cross. So it's incredibly easy. You can go to Redcross dot org and sign up to
be a volunteer today. You can come with training. Say you're a nurse and you want to serve with your licensure, we have ways to plug in and mental health experts, logisticians, I experts. We need everyone who brings those skills to the table. But we'll also train you in skills if you don't have them to live you a part of whether it's responding to a local house fire, being a part of work with the military, or responding disasters
all over the country even around the world. And so you get to right across that org sign up today and just start that process of be a humanitarian response worker. And then donations of course across a lot of money to do what you're doing to help all of these different families across the country in these different difficult situations. Two things here. First of all, can you give us a sense as to how families specifically are being impacted in some of these
different areas that you've been to and have viewed for yourself. And then when someone donates to the American Red Cross, where exactly is that money going, how is it helping? So on the community side, the impact unfortunately is just such a heavier toll on frontline communities, communities that are both on the front lines of the climate crisis. These are families that are pacing repetitive loss
disaster after disaster. You know, last year, I was on a hurricane response and I met a woman who lost her home three times, three times of fifteen years. She had moved each time to avoid a disaster, thinking she was safer and each time and the disaster followed her, and that just loss of resilience each and every time. That same family was also on the front line of other chronic social issues like health, hunger, and housing,
and so at the intersection of those, it's just devastating loss. And so we are really focused on how do we expand our services and build readiness in those communities, making sure they have immediate help but also a pass to long term recovery. And that's why it's so critical that we raise the money and
resources we need to meet that mission because it's growing every single year. In fact, we expect to spend one billion dollars over the next few years to make sure we have the capacity that we've expanded these services and families like I just described get the help they need. And when you donate to the Red Cross, ninety cents on every dollar is spent making sure families and communities get their resources they need, whether it's a disaster services, our work with the
military, or even our work with BioMed. And so when you make that the donation, know that we are spending every single dollar we can to help those in need, programming it in the most efficient and effective way possible while also leveraging partners. We bring hundreds of partners to the table to make sure we're also leveraging their skill sets and their resources so there's not duplication, so that every resource we have is maximized, because in the midst of this crisis,
we need everyone to be at the table. And one thing I want to point out, as someone who has covered for iHeart Radio countless hurricanes in recent years, a lot of times the media attention, the national attention to the places that were hit by a hurricane, whether it's the Panhandle in Florida or the Fort Myers area after Hurricane Ian, that attention fades, but the
need remains. And I know the American Red Cross year they are on the grounds helping these families long after the storm has passed or the wildfire has passed. Correct, That's exactly right, and that long after the cameras disappear, the need actually increases. Those families. We start to see families who thought they had resources but quickly burned through those You can imagine weeks in a hotel at weeks of sleeping on friends and families couches and eating out because your home
has been destroyed. Trying to work through the complex issues of insurance and government programs takes time, and we see those needs start to bubble up weeks after the disaster happens, and that's where the value of our casework and are really
person to persons service that we provide can make all the difference. And so The Cross is committed to being there, to being a part of community's recovery every single day, and we need this support to make sure we can do it not just at the pace we're doing it today, but the pace we know we're going to see tomorrow, which is going to be bigger and faster
than we've ever seen. And again, everyone can learn more first of all about the blood donation shortage and the need for that at Redcross Blood dot org. Specifically red Cross Blood dot Org and If you want to learn more about the relief services provided by the American Red Cross and everything else they do, including all the different ways you can help, from volunteering to donating, go
to Redcross dot org Again Redcross dot org. Trevor Riggan, president of Humanitarian Services at the American Red Cross, with us here on iHeart Radio Communities. Trevor, want to thank you so much for all the tremendous work you're doing and for coming on the show. We appreciate it. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. All Right, Now, I'm Ryan Gorman here on Ihear Radio Communities, and now I'm going to bring in our next guest.
I'm joined by the Acting Administrator from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Carlson for Child Passenger Safety Week. And thank you so much for taking a few minutes to come on the show to talk about this really important issue. And let me start with the latest data on just how dangerous it is for parents to secure their kids in improperly installed car seats. This is one of those things where maybe you think you haven't done right. It looks right,
but perhaps it's not installed exactly how it's supposed to be. I'm sure all parents listening right now want to make sure when they're traveling with their children they're protected as much as humanly possible. So what do the numbers tell us? Sure, let me just start with how many children die and traffic crashes every
year. This is based on twenty twenty one data, So one one eighty four children who died, and a big percentage of those kids are either not in cars at all or are in car seats that are not properly installed. But let me flip that and tell you how just how safe it is if your child is in the appropriate car seat and the car seat is installed appropriately. So we see a reduction and the risk of an infant dying in a car crash of seventy one percent if they're in a properly instant car seat,
and it's all about fifty four percent for toddlers. So it's really really important to make sure not only that you have a car seat, but that it's installed correctly. What are some of the things that parents should keep in mind when first of all, purchasing a car seat. Sure, so one thing to do is to go to NITA has a website NSA dot gov slash the right Seat, and there are lots of there's lots of really good information about a couple of different things. One is what is the right seat for the
child's age, age, weight, and height. That makes a big difference. Another thing is you want to make sure that the car seat is compliant. What that means is that it's certified to MISS is what're called FMBS. It's a safety standard and it gets tested to make sure that it's safe. And then the other thing you want to do is make sure the seat is
installed correctly. And that's where this week is especially important, and our website again at NITZA dot gov slash the right Seat can let you know where to
go find a location where you can get your car seats checked out. And when it comes to making sure car seats are installed properly, what are some general tips that you can provide to parents listening right now so maybe at some point soon they can go out to their vehicles, spend a little time with the car seat, take a second look, double check everything, and make sure that the car seat that they have is installed the right way so their
child is as safe as possible when they're riding in that vehicle. Sure two things. Obviously, follow the instructions. It's not as intuitive if you think it's going to be, especially for the rear facing seats where they really need to be anchored in. So if your car seat is swishing around in the back seat, that's a sign that it's not anchored in improperly. It's got to be really thirty sort of steadily held. So that's the two tips I've
give you. Follow the manufacturer's instructions and make sure that it feels really like it's really anchored into the seat, because if it's improperly installed, as we've already talked about, children are a lot higher risktrey or injury, even death, and there are a lot of car seats that aren't properly installed across the country. That's right, and we estimate that it's about half and again especially problematic for those rear facing seats that really need to be anchored in closely.
So you know, it's really really important that you get it in and that you get it in so that it's installed correctly. You can check again on our website, can check with cities and counties. It's there are a lot of certified experts around the country, who can help make sure if you're if you have any doubt about whether that seat is really anchored in In terms of how far we've come with child safety, whether it's the safety of car seats, the safety of cars, what have we seen in terms of the long
term trend So the long term trends are really encouraging. I mean that's in part because so I'm old enough so that we didn't even wear seatbelts, let alone have car seats. If you look at some really old ones, they are like little hammocks that would hang in the back. They did nothing to
protect a child. So both forall and this is our data about fatalities generally, we've just seen a huge decline and and how many people die per the numbers of miles driven what we call that the rate of fatalities that used to be have around three or four per one hundred million miles, it's now around a little over one. So that's just a huge decline and a lot of that safety has benefited kids. There's other things in the vehicles that make them
a lot safer. So the structure of the vehicle. We have something called electronic stability control, so they don't roll over as easily at courts. Airbags and seat belts, that's really do a lot to protect adults and older teens, etc. So there's tons of safety improvement, but one of the biggest
ones is child safety seats as long as the properly inspelled. I'm Ryan Gorman here on iHeart Radio Communities joined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations Acting Administrator and Carlson to discuss child passenger safety as this is Child Passenger Safety Week. One issue that comes up a lot during the summer months, and it did yet again over the past few months. Hot cars and kids in hot cars.
A number of steps have been taken in recent years to help address that tragic issue because unfortunately there are always a number of fatalities associated with that every year. Yeah, the place you really need to worry about it is obviously in hot climates. You already mentioned the summer, but also the hotter the climate. The more we see kids dying in cars and so places like Florida and Texas and California, you really need to be vigilant. So we run
campaigns reminding people to check, always check. Here's probably the biggest risk factor for children dying in hot cars. It's when you change the caregiver. So it might be that dad takes the child to childcare every morning and one day mom does it and Mom forgets, or grandma, grandpa, or the babysitter, So just really being vigilant and constantly reminding. Another thing is don't leave your child in a car seat to run an errand to run in for fifteen
minutes. It is striking how hot cars getting how quickly a child's body temperature will increase. It's really dramatic, way higher than you ever think it's going to be. The interior of a car can get up to say one hundred twenty twenty five degrees, even when the outside air temperature is lower. So
don't leave your child unattended in a car. And then the final one is if you're not using your car, and it's part saying your driveway or garage lock it, because sometimes kids get into cars and they don't know it and then they can't get out and they can overheat that way too. So those are the three different ways we see children getting trapped in hot cars. Sometimes a caregiver just forgets, and that's the biggest tragedy of all because nobody means
to leave their child in a hot car. So again, if you're changing care givers, if you're changing your routine in some way, really got to remind yourself. You can even put you know, we'll put a sticky on your on your dashboard to remind yourself, turn around and check if a child's asleep or something. You know, it happens and you're sleep deprived and you're off to work or you're off you know, in a hurry, and you just forget it can happen, and we want to make sure that it doesn't.
Those are just really, really tragic deaths. Can you give us a sense of all the different kinds of work you do at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration beyond things like Child Passenger Safety Week or some of the initiatives that you just mentioned tied to preventing kids from being left in hot cars. Sure, so we do rulemakings. We issue what are called federal motor vehicle safety standards. Of course, one of the most obvious ones is for seat belts.
Those are mandatory, but not just having a seatbelt, but making sure the seat belt works in a particular way and its protective as it can be rules for airbags, which are really really protective strengthening the vehicle. And we have a couple new proposed rules for automatic emergency breaking, which would basically take over from a driver who either doesn't break hard enough or doesn't break at all, and prevent a crash from happening, and can even avoid pedestrians even at
night. So it's pretty remarkable technology. So that's a big part of what we do. We also issue fuel economy standards to make your car more fuel efficient, to get you more mileage for less gasoline, really really important. We have a new proposal that has just come out that would really increase fuel economy dramatically. We also administer about eight hundred million dollars a year in grants to states who use that money to keep you safer on the road. But
it's mostly for behavior. So there are four behaviors that contribute to crashes way too frequently. One is failure to wear a speedboats. Seems really obvious, but half of all fatalities are among people who are not wearing the sheetbelt. That's such an easy way to protect yourself impair driving. I'm afraid we've gotten way better about people not getting behind the wheel and driving drunk. But we're not there yet, and there's still too many people that get behind the wheel.
Don't do it a designated driver, take a ride share, don't get behind the wheel when you're drinking. A third is distracted driving, and this one's a real problem and it's on the increase. Why because everybody's got their cell phones and everybody thinks, oh, I need to look at this text immediately, even though that text can wait, and it can be the difference between life or death. Crash or not. Taking your eyes off the road and looking at your phone is a bad idea. And the final one is
speeding. So everybody speeds. We know that. We survey people. Lots of people think speeding isn't dangerous. It's dangerous, and not just its speeds that are saying one hundred miles an hour on the freeways obviously dangerous. But if you're going ten miles over the limit and you're on a residential roadway and you hit a pedestrian, if you were going ten miles lower, you might be able to stop, or you might not injure them as father even prevent
them from dying. So we do a lot to try to get drivers to reduce those behaviors that can really cause problems. And then finally, we recall vehicles that are unsafe, and we have you can check again on the it's a website. You can go check and see whether your vehicle is under recall, and if it is, the manufacturer is required to provide a remedy for three. You don't have to pay for it. You just got to get
your vehicle in to get it repaired. Final question for you, I've read a number of reports that in post pandemic America we've seen some significant issues on the roads in terms of crashes and fatalities. We talked earlier about the trend line when it comes to child passenger safety, but overall crashes fatalities on Americas roads, what are we seeing in recent years. That's a great question. And we thought that when we're a lot of people staying home during the pandemic,
that we'd see a reduction fatalities. We saw the opposite. Fatalities went up in twenty twenty one. They are starting to come down, but we're still seeing well over forty thousand people dying every single year on our roadways, and we did see an increase in some of those behaviors I just talked about impair driving, speeding, sometimes feeding while impaired, really really bad thing to do, driving without a seat belt. We saw seat belt rates decline in
some areas. We didn't see an increase in crashes. What we saw is an increase in fatal crashes. And that's because of these dangerous behaviors that we're really really contributing to more people dying on our roadway. But let me just say one of the things, even before the pandemic, too many people are dying on our roadways. And that's why I at the US Department of Transportation, we've adopted something called a National Roadways Safety Strategy, which is designed basically
these every tool we have to try to drive down fatalities. You shouldn't risk your life to go to the grocery store or to go to work, or to go visit somebody and you know, driving on a highway. And so we're really trying to do everything we can, everything from redesigning roadways, reducing speeds, using speed safety cameras, you know, engaging in communications campaigns to get people to wear their seatbelts, to drive sober. You might recognize some
of that. Click at our ticket, drive sober, get pulled over. These are all MITSA ads that we run, so we're really working to try to drive traffic fatalities down, traffic injuries down, traffic crashes overall down. National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations Acting Administrator and Carlson with us to discuss child passenger safety and a whole lot more. As this week is Child Passenger Safety Week, you can learn more about all the work this agency does at NHTSA dot
gov. That's NHTSA dot Gov. I want to thank you so much for taking a few minutes to come on the show and share all of that with us. We really appreciate it. Say thank you, Ryan, I really appreciate the opportunity to get to share that information. Of course, all right, that's going to do it for this edition of iHeartRadio Communities. As we wrap things up, I want to offer a big thanks to all of our guests and of course to all of you for listening. If you want to
hear previous episodes of this show, we're on your iHeartRadio app. Just search for iHeartRadio Communities. I'm your host, Ryan Gorman. We'll talk to you again real soon