Seat Belts, Safety and Celebrities: Princess Diana, a Seat Belt and the Crash in the Alma Tunnel in Paris, France
OK, I’m not going to bore you with a lot of statistics about seat belts and how they save lives. You probably already know these statistics by now, and besides, I’ve put those statistics up before on this website, and I’m sure I’ll do it again in the future. Although it doesn’t seem to do that much good. Some people just don’t like to wear seat belts. And they bet their lives on the chance that they won’t get into a serious collision or be ejected from their vehicles in a crash. News reports tell us every day about people who lost that bet.
And no matter how beloved or important you are, if you’re not wearing a seat belt and you get into a serious car accident, you’ll probably die from your injuries. Since August 31, 1997, there have been ongoing speculations regarding whether Princess Diana would have survived the crash in the Alma tunnel in Paris, France if she had been wearing her seat belt. The only person to survive the crash was Trevor Rees-Jones, who many news reports say wore his seatbelt at the time of the crash. But a British inquiry into the matter decided that he was not seat belted, and the French inquiry concluded that he was actually in the process of trying to buckle up when the crash occurred.
News reports say that the car that Trevor Rees-Jones, Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul occupied hit a concrete pillar at a speed approaching 100 mph. Pictures from the crash in the Alma tunnel in Paris, France show an automobile almost flattened by the collision. It’s hard to imagine that a seat belt would have helped that much. But perhaps it would have. Princess Diana’s cause of death seems to have been cardiac arrest because of massive hemorrhaging from a torn pulmonary artery. This is a classic injury result when an unbelted passenger in a car accident crashes hard into the car interior in front of them.
Unfortunately, unusual celebrity accidents and fatalities hold some kind of morbid sway over the human psyche. If Princess Diana had been an ordinary woman and not a stylish Princess beloved around the world, probably no one but close friends or relatives would still be discussing her car accident in the Alma tunnel in Paris, France. Yet in the ongoing discussions that still surround her tragic and untimely demise, the Princess’s seat belt is sometimes overlooked. But I’ll call attention to it again here. So that maybe the Princess’s seat belt can serve as a warning to others to buckle up. Put on that seat belt when you get into the car. We can’t go back in time and save Princess Diana and her companions from the crash in the Alma tunnel in Paris, France. But we can learn the lesson that the Princess’s seat belt reveals, and perhaps we can save our own lives in the event of a car accident.