I-95 Crash Rips Roof Off Car in Upper Chichester, Seat Belts Save Driver and Child

A driver and a child are safe after a crash on southbound Interstate 95 in Upper Chichester Township tore the entire roof off their car Thursday morning, and officials say seat belts are the reason both walked away. The Upper Chichester Fire Department was called at 7:30 a.m. on reports of people trapped in the wreckage, only to find the vehicle's roof completely gone.

According to NBC10 Philadelphia, fire department photos from the scene showed the entire roof of the car sheared off in the collision. The driver was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, while the child in the vehicle was not hurt at all. Officials credited the pair's seat belts with keeping them inside the car during the impact, and used the incident as an opportunity to remind drivers to buckle up.

How Seat Belts Kept Two People From Being Thrown From the Wreck

The outcome lines up with what state and federal safety officials have long said about restraint use in violent collisions. Wearing a seat belt increases a motor vehicle occupant's chance of surviving a crash by up to 60 percent, according to PennDOT. Unbelted occupants face far grimmer odds: data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows unrestrained occupants are 30 times more likely to be totally ejected from a vehicle in a crash, and roughly 75 percent of ejected occupants die from their injuries, per the agency's research cited by United Tires.

With the roof torn away, the driver and child in Thursday's crash were left without the vehicle's upper structure protecting them, a scenario in which ejection risk normally climbs sharply. Their belts appear to have kept them positioned inside the car's frame despite that structural loss. NHTSA research also notes that airbags are designed to work in tandem with seat belts, warning that an inflating airbag alone can cause severe or fatal injuries to an occupant who is not properly restrained.

Pennsylvania's Seat Belt Rules Treat Adults and Minors Differently

Pennsylvania law does not enforce seat belt use the same way for every occupant. Under Title 75 Section 4581, compliance is a secondary offense for adult drivers, meaning officers cannot pull a vehicle over solely because an adult isn't buckled in, but it becomes a primary offense for drivers under age 18, according to Edgar Snyder & Associates. For younger children, the state's Child Passenger Safety Law sets more specific requirements: those under age 2 must ride in a rear-facing car seat, children 2 to 4 need an approved child safety seat, and kids 4 to 8 must use a booster seat with a lap and shoulder belt, per PennDOT.

The stakes behind those rules are stark statewide. PennDOT recorded 1,127 total roadway fatalities across Pennsylvania in 2024, and 311 of those deaths involved unrestrained vehicle occupants, even as the state's seat belt usage rate stood at 87.6 percent. Nationally, seat belt adoption has reached about 90 percent in recent years, a rate NHTSA estimates saves roughly 15,000 lives annually across the country.

A Familiar Stretch of Highway for Delaware County First Responders

Thursday's crash adds to a run of major incidents along this stretch of I-95 in Delaware County. In May, an overturned tractor-trailer and fuel spill forced a total closure of all southbound lanes in Upper Chichester Township, according to a report captured on WPVI-TV's Facebook page. Around the same time as Thursday's crash, PennDOT had also begun infrastructure base repair work requiring daytime closures of nearby Bethel Road across Upper Chichester and Bethel Townships, shifting some local traffic patterns in the surrounding area.

The Upper Chichester Fire Department, known as Station 10, was formed in 2001 through the consolidation of three historic volunteer companies — Boothwyn, Ogden, and Reliance — and deploys heavy rescue units for highway extrications, according to the department's own account. That kind of specialized equipment is often what crews need to reach occupants trapped in the mangled wreckage of high-speed highway collisions like Thursday's.

Hoodline has previously covered serious incidents along this same corridor, including a fatal I-95 shooting and crash in Delaware County. Thursday's outcome was markedly different: no fatality, and officials pointing to a simple safety habit as the reason why.