STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Last week we reported on the unfortunate but understandable misfortune of a young man who made
an instinctive decision when confronted suddenly, in the dark, by a wayward deer.
[Click Here for Column] Our young man
reacted the way most of us do, he jerked the wheel to avoid the deer and ended up inside a
burning pick-up truck that had lost the battle with the large tree it had just hit.
Our point was that drivers need to prepare themselves to choose the lesser of two evils in
confrontations with animals. Sure, we hate to kill anything. Sure, there may be damage to the
vehicle. But none of that compares to the third degree burns and the 200 hundred stitches
required to close this man's wounds.
Unfortunately, we all love a good story more than cold reality. So we've all heard the one
about the cow or the horse or the deer that came through cousin Harry's windshield and kicked
him to death back in '57. And that sticks in our minds more strongly than anything else we might
know. So I got a few calls about that column and some "on the other hand" stories. I decided to
see what the facts might be.
NORTH CAROLINA ACCIDENT FACTS
The Department of Motor Vehicles in the DOT publishes a neat little book every year entitled
North Carolina Traffic Accident Facts. There you can learn more about what we motorists did to
each other, to pedestrians, to cyclists and motorcyclists, to animals and trees last year than
you ever wanted to know. Now I love numbers and facts and I wondered if by chance there might be
a way to confirm my strong belief that hitting a deer was safer than hitting a tree.
So I called Linda Wall at the DMV. She's the keeper of the facts and your helpful tour guide
through the Accident Facts Book. Along with dozens of other interesting breakdowns of the data,
things like 15 categories of what the vehicle was doing just before the accident; eg. from
"going straight ahead" to "parking" or "changing lanes", the book contains a helpful chart
entitled "Type of Accident; First Harmful Event".
And here is where we learn something. In 1993 8,607 times a vehicle struck an animal. In those
accidents 1 person died and 648, or 7% suffered an injury. That means that 93% suffered vehicle
damage only. There is another "First Harmful Event" titled "Ran off road". This happened 38,431
times. Here 521 people died and 18,671 or 48% suffered injury. Can you dig it? You have a 93%
chance of surviving without injury a collision with an animal and only a 10% chance of surviving
an off-road excursion.
Yes, I know that the Chicago lawyers in the audience are saying, "Wait a minute. Those animals
in your stats range from chipmunks to water buffalo (do we have water buffalo in North
Carolina?), so it could be worse than that." My answer is in two parts. First if you called the
cops to report an accident with a poor little chipmunk, you're a real wimp. And second, odds is
odds. Some of those drivers who ran off the road went into a tobacco field and not a forest,
too, so the numbers tell the truth. Stay on the road. It's safer.
|
|
|
|
|
| Click on a city below to register for a clinic |
- Akron/Canton, OH
- Athens, GA
- Atlanta, GA
- Bristol/Kingsport, TN
- Cincinnati, OH
- Cleveland, OH
- Columbus, OH
- Crowne Point, IN
- Fort Wayne, IN
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- Johnstown, PA
- Las Vegas, NV
- Ventura County, CA
- Melbourne, FL
- Palm Springs, CA
- Phoenix, AZ
- St. Petersburg, FL
- Stuart, FL
- Tampa Bay, FL
- Washington D.C., MD & VA
- West Palm, FL
|
|
|
|
|