Door to Danger

Clad only in a bathing suit, Gary Hauptli, 8, was running toward the patio of a friend's home in Seattle. But Gary never reached the patio; he smashed into a sliding glass door that had been closed only minutes before to keep barbecue smoke from blowing into the house. The thin glass exploded in a shower of jagged fragments. It took doctors two hours to make the 64 stitches in Gary's head, wrists and legs.

His father, Jack Hauptli, an assistant city editor of the Seattle Times, started checking, in a matter of days came up with a list of 18 other children and adults who had been involved in glass-door accidents in the Seattle area. Among them: Harold Emery, 15, who slashed his left eye after plowing through a glass panel; Charles Russell, 9, who pivoted into a door, died after severing an artery in his knee; Anthony Dipangrazio, 8, who hit a glass door, sliced a jagged gash from eye to chin; Susan Warren, n, who, in pursuit of butterflies, ran through a glass door that had a warning: "This Door Is Closed" pasted on at adult eye level.

Charles Christofferson, 9, ran through a closed patio door, fell back on a 9-inch shard of glass, puncturing his large intestine.

Obviously what happened in Seattle has been happening elsewhere in the U.S. No subdivision worth its fancy name comes without hundreds of sliding doors--mobile picture windows designed to "bring the outdoors indoors." Office builders have tried to make their entrances invisible (some have done away with doors entirely, have "curtains" of swooshing air instead), and in executive suites more than one vice president has mistaken a floor-to-ceiling glass door for a clear path to the water cooler.

After a year and a half of goading by Jack Hauptli, the Seattle city council has finally adopted an ordinance requiring home builders to use sliding glass doors of laminated glass (which will not fall out of its frame if broken), tempered glass (which breaks into tiny, blunt-edged granules), or wired glass (similar to that used in industrial buildings). The cost to builders will run to about $40 more per door than the old kind.

Spurred on by Seattle's action, the National Safety Council--at the request of the glass industry itself--has launched a study of the growing danger of glass doors in homes, with an eye to establishing nationwide safety standards.

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