ORLANDO, Fla. – The National Safety Council, celebrating 100 years of safety, recognized Salisbury native Elizabeth Dole Monday with its Flame of Life Award as one of the century’s foremost leaders in safety.
The award, which recognizes significant lifesaving contributions to safety, has only been awarded three times previously. Dole’s leadership of safety initiatives throughout every stage of her career makes her a giant in the history of safety, according to an NSC press release.
As secretary of transportation from 1983-1987, Dole influenced President Reagan and Congress to enact the 21-year-old drinking age. Passage of this uniform drinking age eliminated “blood borders” where young people were killed or gravely injured returning from a neighboring state with a lower drinking age.
About the same time, she issued a landmark regulation which resulted in widespread enactment of state safety-belt laws and air bags in all cars. Not a single state at the time had passed a safety-belt law, usage was 13 percent, and air bags were virtually non-existent. These three actions have saved nearly 400,000 lives to date with an estimated 20,000 lives saved each year.
During Dole’s tenure as Secretary of Labor from 1989-1990, she continued to make safety and health leadership her hallmark.
Among the many Occupational Health and Safety Administration actions under her guidance were the Lockout-Tagout Standard, which established procedures to safeguard more than 39 million workers and prevent an estimated 120 fatalities and 50,000 injuries each year.
Under her leadership, OSHA addressed the important issue of ergonomics and promulgated a stronger rule to protect construction workers from the hazards of working in trenches and excavations. Since issuing the rule, trenching fatalities have declined by 40 percent. A major new regulation to protect workers against blood-borne pathogens, such as AIDS and Hepatitis B, was DOL’s first time in history to deal with a biological hazard or infectious disease.
Among her major initiatives with the Mine Safety and Health Administration was the “Patterns Rule,” which sought to crack down on repeated serious violations.
As president of the American Red Cross from 1991-1999, Dole directed the work of 32,000 staff members and 1.3 million volunteers. She led a massive transformation of the way the Red Cross collects, tests and distributes a half of the nation’s blood supply. It was a seven-year effort designed to move antiquated World War II-era blood bank practices to a centralized state-of-the-art system with standard operating procedures.
It involved integrating 28 different computer systems into a central operation and replacing 53 testing laboratories with eight new high-tech labs to ensure that blood is safe to give and safe to get.
Among Dole’s many accomplishments as the first woman U.S. senator from North Carolina (2003-2009), she strongly supported 2005 Highway Act provisions that gave major incentives to states to upgrade their safety-belt laws.
“Elizabeth Dole’s career is filled with impactful examples of strategies put in place to save lives and prevent injuries,” said Janet Froetscher, president and chief executive officer of NSC.
“Dole is one of the century’s foremost safety leaders. Her leadership has played a crucial role in the safety movement and is an inspiration for all those who dedicate their lives to keeping others safe and well.”
Dole joins an elite group of safety leaders who have been honored with the Flame of Life Award. In 1971, the award was given to the Ad Council for its focus on raising awareness about traffic safety.
In 2006, the award was presented to seven principal leaders of the Air Bag and Seat Belt Safety Campaign for their work in saving lives associated with air bags and safety-belt use, which included taking “Click it or Ticket” and the concept of high visibility enforcement of traffic laws from a one-state pilot program to a national initiative.
In 2010, the NSC Chairman of the Board at that time, Joseph Ucciferro, was given the award for leading the development of a new NSC strategy that defined how to save an additional 10,000 lives and prevent 1 million injuries by 2014.