Crib anxiety jams Stork Craft website, phones

Parents are reporting they are unable to get through to Stork Craft Manufacturing, the B.C.-based company involved in the largest-ever North Americanrecall of baby cribs after four infant deaths.

Stork Craft's phone lines have been busy, and its website has been unresponsive.

Vancouver mom Amanda Carkener was involved in Stork Craft's first crib recall earlier this year and said it was difficult to reach the company last time.

"I hope they handle this one better than the last recall, because the last recall, a lot of mothers I spoke to got rid of their Stork Craft cribs and they didn't buy one again," Carkener said in an interview Monday with CBC News.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada issued the recall Monday for 1.2 million cribs in the U.S. and almost one million in Canada. They were made between January 1993 and October 2009. The recall followed reports of four infants suffocating after becoming trapped between the mattress and the drop-down slide.

Stork Craft said in a statement Tuesday that it has already stopped selling cribs with a functional drop side.

"For the past several months, we have been transitioning to non-drop-side cribs," according to the statement.

The Richmond, B.C.-based firm said it has been making drop-side cribs since 1953. It first became aware of problems involving infants getting pegged underneath the collapsed drop side last year. At that time, the CPSC initiated a recall of several varieties of cribs with drop-side features.

Carkener says when her crib was recalled the first time, she couldn't get through to Stork Craft by telephone and the website kept crashing. In the end, it took her weeks to get the parts she needed.

Carkener said she's shocked there has been a second recall concerning the same crib. Now she worries even more about her child's safety.

"You want to be able to trust when your child's asleep and I can't hear him, that he's safe," she said. "And when I'm told, twice now, that cribs are not safe for your child to sleep in, how well do I sleep at night?"

Stork Craft defends cribs

Stork Craft defended its manufacturing, saying its cribs have met or exceeded all Canadian and U.S. standards.

"In the majority of incidents, the cribs were being used with broken parts, parts with pieces missing, parts that were damaged or with modified or homemade parts," the firm said in a statement.

"In some incidents, the crib was in a state of significant disrepair. In other cases, the consumer had installed the drop-side rail upside down contrary to the instructions that are glued to the mattress base of each crib. This causes extraordinary stress on the plastic parts that could result in breakage."

Part of the problem was that many of the cribs involved in the recall were purchased second-hand and used "multiple times by different caregivers," said the firm.

Stork Craft advised consumers to keep the crib's original box, packaging and instructions so that it could be reassembled correctly in the future.