I received a heads-up email from Shawn Cummings this morning simply saying "Another one in Maine." 

Sure enough, a van had driven head first into a Dunkin Donuts near Portland Maine.  That incident is depicted in the photo on the left, above.  Less than a month ago, a very similar incident occurred at a different Dunkin Donuts location in Hatfield Township Pennsylvania, which was hit for the second time in a month.  The photo of that more recent incident in Hatfield is the one on the right, above.

Pay attention to the similar store layout....mostly glass frontage, nose-in parking, nothing but a sidewalk between oncoming cars and people standing, sitting, or working inside those stores.  And these look like modern stores too -- why on earth does Dunkin Donuts continue to crank out locations that are so obviously unsafe?  All the injuries ( there were six more injured in the accident today in Maine) and all of the lawsuits (settled and pending) apparently have not been enough to get any corporate notice at Dunkin Brands, which owns both Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins.  All of the warnings, incidents, and negative attention is still apparently too little to get enough corporate attention to correct a very correctable problem.

So let me make this very clear:  Dunkin Donuts franchisees and Dunkin Brands -- you are on notice that storefront crashes are foreseeable, predictable, and preventable.  You are on notice that when you fail to place effective barriers in front of stores or require safety barrier installation as part of the franchise agreements you make, you are perpetuating at your locations a known hazardous condition that you have purposefully failed to address.  You have lives of customers, pedestrians, and employees at risk every day, despite much evidence that you need to take immediate, effective and affordable action.  Dunkin Brands, you are on notice.

Now back Shawn Cummings.  The reason he emailed me "another one in Maine" is that on March 1st this year, Shawn's 66 year-old mother Sharla Cummings was working at her job at a RiteAid in Maine when a car driven my an 84-year old driver accelerated through a nose-in ADA parking space, over the sidewalk and through the wall of the store, crushing Sharla against the cash desk where she was working.  Severely injured, Sharla has been unable to work and is still recovering from her injuries.  The photo from that accident is below.  Look familiar?
Nose-in parking spaces, cars approaching straight at the store, nothing but a sidewalk to protect employees from oncoming cars.

As many as sixty times per day, a vehicle crashes into a store, restaurant, office, or other commercial building.  This is a fact that Shawn and his mother know very well.  This is also a fact that Dunkin Brands and Dunkin Donuts franchisees know very well.  Thanks to people like Shawn, companies like Dunkin Brands and their franchisees cannot pretend that they did not notice --  because now, they are ON notice.

by Mark Wright, Co-founder, Storefront Safety Council
Editor's Note: This post is co-published on the Retail Store Safety Blog

It’s so easy to think we’ll be coming back when we walk out the door in the morning, isn’t it? As we grab our keys and turn that lock, we say to ourselves, “Oh, I’ll do that later,” or “I’ll make that phone call when I get home tonight.”

That’s what I thought, too, when I left to start what I assumed would be a normal day in August 2008. Little did I know that just a few hours later, I’d get hit by a car as it crashed through the doors of my favorite nearby 7-Eleven. I didn't come through my own front door again until many weeks later, after spending time in two hospitals and two nursing homes.

It would be nice now, seven years later, to just chalk that experience up to a life-lesson learned or a weird fluke that just a few of us experience. But when I heard in the news about a car that crashed into a building recently just down the street from where I once worked, I was reminded that this problem is not a rare fluke. In fact, it’s all too common.
   
This particular incident wasn’t very different from those you can read about throughout the pages here of storefrontsafety.org. “An elderly woman smashed her car through a Rockville, Maryland, parking garage and into a physical therapy office,” according to one of the <TV news reports> [http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Car-Drives-Off-Parking-Garage-Crashes-Into-Building-302925411.html].

Unfortunately, she injured herself as well as others, particularly a receptionist at the PT office — sitting at her desk doing her work like any other seemingly normal day — who was pinned under a desk and debris by the crash.

Two things grabbed my attention about this incident.

First, on a personal level, it was right in my old stomping grounds, maybe a hundred yards from my former office. So, do I feel like these crashes are hitting pretty close to home? Yeah. Going through it once was one time too many — no need for a repeat.

Second, and more importantly, the fire department public information officer made a seldom-voiced observation to the news media while he was on scene.

He said, “There’s not much of a barrier,” as he looked at the vehicle’s path. “There’s a parking space, a little cement, the sidewalk, a grassy area and then the building. It didn’t take much effort to get in there.”
If by some miracle you, dear reader, happen to be a commercial property owner or an architect, please…read his remarks again. Very little stood between a moving vehicle and an innocent receptionist on the other side of a glass window.

I’ll refrain from getting preachy here. Suffice it to say that one of the common elements in most vehicle-into-building crashes (especially those that lead to injuries or deaths) is the lack of any sufficient barrier to protect pedestrians and building occupants from an out-of-control car.
Putting bollards or other appropriate standards-based barriers between people, buildings, and parking spaces is easy. Almost as easy as walking out the door in the morning thinking we’ll be coming back later.