Americans mark the end of summer with the Labor Day holiday weekend, a time to celebrate the hard work and accomplishments of our country. Friends and families await pool parties, backyard barbecues and other occasions to enjoy the last days of summer.
Sadly, the Labor Day holiday has also become one of the deadliest, with drunk drivers endangering themselves and others on their way home from these holiday festivities.
This year, the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office is partnering with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to get drunk drivers off the roads and help save lives. The high-visibility national enforcement campaign — “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over” — runs from Aug. 17 through Sept. 3.
“We need our community to understand that it’s up to them to make the smart decision to drive sober, Labor Day and every day,” Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand said. “Drunk driving is a huge problem in our country and the numbers are rising, little by little.”
During this period, local law enforcement will show zero tolerance for drunk driving. Increased state and national messages about the dangers of driving impaired, coupled with enforcement and increased officers on the road, aim to drastically reduce drunk driving on our nation’s roadways.
“This isn’t about a ticketing campaign,” Hildenbrand said. “This is about a campaign to get the message out that drunk driving is illegal and it takes lives. Help us put an end to this senseless behavior.”
Unfortunately, the statistics prove that a lot of work needs to be done to put an end to drunk driving. According to NHTSA, 10,497 people were killed in drunk-driving crashes in 2016 — or one person every 50 minutes. On average, 10,000 people were killed each year from 2012 to 2016. That’s the equivalent of 20 jumbo jets crashing each year, with no survivors.
That is why the sheriff’s office is working with NHTSA to remind drivers that drunk driving is not only illegal, it is a matter of life and death.
Over the 2016 Labor Day holiday period (6 p.m. Sept. 2 until 5:59 a.m. Sept. 6), there were 433 crash fatalities nationwide, according to an Aug. 13 sheriff’s office press release. Of the fatal crashes, more than one-third (36 percent) involved drivers who were drunk (.08-plus blood alcohol concentration), and one-fourth (25 perent) involved drivers who were driving with a BAC almost twice the legal limit (.15-plus BAC).
Age is a particularly risky factor, the press release stated. Among the drivers between the ages of 18 and 34 who were killed in crashes over the Labor Day holiday period in 2016, 47 percent of those fatalities involved drunk drivers with BACs of .08 or higher.
There is a small, silver lining: During the 2016 Labor Day holiday, 36 percent of fatalities in traffic crashes involved a drunk driver, which was one of the lowest percentages over the five-year period from 2012 to 2016.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” Hildenbrand said. “The trend for the Labor Day holiday is in a positive direction, but our goal is to have zero fatalities, always.”
