The story began with a simple conversation: a lawyer told us of a fatal accident involving something called "tread separation." In this case, he claimed a woman was driving her Ford Explorer down a Texas highway when suddenly one of the car's tires, a Firestone Radial ATX, simply lost its tread. At that point, it was just a tip, but we decided to look into it further. Additional contacts with attorneys and others revealed more cases involving the same tire and car combination: Firestone ATX tires and Ford Explorers.
Obviously, our curiosity was piqued: How big was the problem? We found that some traditional resources didn't provide the answer. For example, the government's Fatality Analysis Reporting System database did not list tire brands or makes. And the tire manufacturers, who collected tire return and failure claim data considered that information to be "proprietary." (Although such information was often turned over to plaintiffs' attorneys during lawsuits, it might be protected by court order.)
Paper trail
So we gathered our own data by using, among other documents, court records and accident reports. We also interviewed a number of experts who were in a hands-on position to know what the industry's data on these tires might be like.
We knew the limits of our approach and our data wouldn't allow for any kind of statistical analysis, but we decided that that was not our goal in any event. In the first place, any real "answers" about the allegations would only be obtained through an objective and scientific analysis of both a full body of the industry's data along with a mechanical investigation of both the tire types and perhaps even the SUV model.
Therefore, the point of our story was that there clearly seemed to be enough allegations to warrant an in-depth investigative broadcast asking whether or not there was a problem and to bring it to the attention of Firestone, Ford, the appropriate government officials, and the public itself. If that happened, then perhaps it would lead to an open and scientific look at the issue.
We went to work and soon sat down to discuss the cases we had accumulated - at the time, more than two dozen deaths that victims' families claimed allegedly resulted from tread separations on Firestone ATX tires mounted on Ford Explorers.
A spokesperson for The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told us agency officials were unaware of any pattern of accidents involving the tire and SUV, despite the dozens of complaints from Ford Explorer owners we had found on the agency's own Web site. (Although many of those complaints did not identify a specific model or even make of tire, by this time we knew that the Radial ATX had been original equipment on thousands of Explorers and many of the complaints appeared to be about tread separations.)
Our findings were further supported in the first story, Feb. 7, 2000, by a former employee of Firestone's North Carolina tire plant, who told us about what he felt were quality control problems at the plant.
Results
Three nights later, as we were about to air a follow-up report, the president of our corporation received a multi-page letter from Firestone disputing our story. The letter called our report "misleading."
The letter also called our story unbalanced and stated "the broadcast may be grounds for finding of actual malice." We included the company's response in our February 10 story, reporting their most damaging allegations in the interests of fairness. We also posted the full letter on our Web site for viewers to read.
However, we continued to investigate, eventually learning that NHTSA was doing its own internal investigation of complaints reported by our viewers to the agency. By May, the agency announced it was beginning a defect investigation into the Firestone ATX, ATX2, and Wilderness AT tires.
As we monitored the investigation, there was another break in the story. On July 30, a source called to let us know that since late May, Ford had been recalling ATX and Wilderness tires from Ford Explorers in Venezuela because of accidents similar to ones in the U.S. We even found out that Ford was planning to include similar recalls in Ecuador and Columbia. Within days, the national media jumped on board and coverage of the issue became widespread. Finally, just weeks later Firestone made the announcement it would voluntarily recall more than six million ATX, ATX II, and Wilderness AT tires.
Obviously the story didn't stop there. We also broke the story that Venezuela was considering criminal charges against both Ford and Firestone. And, of course, events here eventually led to congressional hearings, and the recent passage of a new law that among other things sets criminal penalties for manufacturers who don't address defects and forces them to tell the federal government when they recall products in other countries.