Proposed safety legislation causes controversy

Meanwhile, Chamberlain officials maintain their stance, and assure their efforts are, and always have been, safety-focused — not financially motivated.

“Chamberlain was one of the prime companies in the original movement to have an external secondary reversal system required in addition to the force reversal system that’s within the operator,” points out Mark Karasek, executive vice president of engineering and chief technology officer for the Elmhurst, Ill.-based manufacturer of residential garage door openers.

Karasek purports that after discovering in the late ‘80s that there were more than 70 child deaths resulting from garage door entrapment, Chamberlain pushed the industry to improve safety requirements. After receiving a sluggish response from the industry – and after two children in the same state died in quick succession from being pinned under garage doors – Chamberlain started working with a liability attorney and a Minnesota congressman. All three began lobbying for a bill that required openers to adhere to more stringent standards. This bill was enacted in 1993, and eventually IRs became the standard external secondary reversal system used in virtually every garage door sold in the United States.

“After IRs became standard, there have been zero deaths when the IRs have been properly installed — though we know of one death where the IRs were purposefully misaligned,” says Karasek. “Prior to 1993, there were less than 30 million garage door openers in the marketplace. Today there are more than 50 million in the marketplace. So, prior to IRs, you had a higher death rate with a relatively lower number of installed units, and today you have a dramatically increased number of units and virtually zero deaths.”