From The Hidden Hazards
On a November morning in 1998, Alan Pakula climbed into his Volvo station wagon and began the 100-mile drive from Manhattan to his Long Island house. The acclaimed movie director (Sophie's Choice, All the President's Men) had made the trip countless times without incident.As the 70-year-old Pakula neared exit 49 on the Long Island Expressway just before noon, a vehicle ahead of him drove over a seven-foot steel rod in the road, kicking it into the air. Within seconds, the rod shot through Pakula's windshield, smashing into his forehead and killing him almost instantly. Authorities never determined where the rod, the kind used to secure a tractor-trailer's load, came from.
News reports called it a "freak" accident, which puts it in the same category as other tragedies to make headlines in recent years: a 22-year-old New Jersey woman was left with a body's worth of broken bones after swerving to dodge a deer; a 24-year-old Washington woman needed major reconstructive surgery after a wall unit fell off a truck and smashed into her face; a young couple were killed by a falling tree that crushed their SUV on a suburban New York parkway.
Though the details of each are unique, these accidents share a common, unsettling theme: the way hidden hazards on, in, and around our roads claim innocent lives.
It is estimated that there are at least 1.6 million car accidents a year involving trees, animals and vehicle debris. A Reader's Digest analysis of government data found that in 2003, such crashes caused over 600 deaths. Even scarier: These accidents are increasing. From 1999 to 2003, deaths tied to vehicle debris jumped 43 percent, from 298 a year to 427. Animal-car deaths rose 38 percent, from 152 to 210.
That's just part of the story. With out-of-the-blue crashes just a sliver of the 6.3 million accidents, 2.9 million injuries and 42,600 road deaths, they get scant notice compared to, say, drunk driving. That means the root causes go ignored.
That's starting to change -- good news to people like Greg Cohen, executive director of the nonprofit Roadway Safety Foundation. Looking beyond these accidents' freak nature, he says, can bring down the death toll.
After all, he says, "Conscientious drivers can only do so much."
Road Kill
On March 17, 2005, Cynthia Mallette, 61, was about a mile from home in rural Yell Township, Iowa, when three deer ran into the road in front of her. The retired factory worker hit the brakes, but the vehicle's front left side struck one of the deer. The animal was fatally wounded. Her minivan's front end was crushed.Mallette was mostly unhurt, which made her a typical deer-crash victim. Fellow Iowan James Slobodnik wasn't so lucky. Last August, Slobodnik, 71, was driving on State Highway 92 in Columbus Junction when he hit a deer. The impact sent his car sailing into a ditch. He died at the scene.
The United States has a Bambi problem. The number of vehicle and deer collisions is conservatively put at 1.5 million a year. One major factor: The deer population has grown from 500,000 to 30 million in the past century. Texas, for example, is now home to 3.5 million deer, compared to 225,000 in 1940.
The suburbs, meanwhile, keep sprawling. By one estimate, 2.2 mil-lion wild acres are developed each year. "We're encroaching more and more into the deer's environment," says Keith Knapp, director of the University of Wisconsin's Deer-Vehicle Crash Information Clearinghouse. "This is a big problem."
And a frustrating one. Says Jim Nall, a traffic and safety engineer with Colorado's transportation department: "It's impossible to warn the public exactly when and where wildlife will appear."
In Nall's state, deer-vehicle crashes have more than tripled since 1993. Colorado isn't alone. In a 2003 national study by Utah State University's Jack H. Berryman Institute, one-third of state wildlife and transportation officials said deer-vehicle collisions were on the rise in their states.
Deer aren't the only four-legged hazards. The country's moose population is increasing too. Herds have lately emerged in New York and Connecticut. Massachusetts -- where they were rarely seen through the 1970s -- is now home to about 1,000. Last year, the state had 52 reported moose-vehicle crashes, up from 8 five years earlier.
Those crashes can be catastrophic. At six feet tall and weighing half a ton, moose are far deadlier than deer. One in 250 drivers who hit a moose wind up dead, compared to one in 5,000 who hit a deer. A moose hit by a car typically flies onto the hood and roof, and sometimes goes through the windshield. "I've seen cases where the force of the moose left the car looking like someone took a can opener and opened the roof right up," says Bill Woytek, deer and moose project leader for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Massachusetts recorded its first-ever moose-vehicle death in July 2003, when high school teacher Amber Ronzoni, 24, hit one on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Experts say better tools are needed to cut the number of animal-car crashes. What's not working well, they add, are car-mounted whistles that supposedly emit an ultrasonic sound that scares deer. "Deer crossing" signs aren't a lot better; drivers ignore them.
One promising strategy uses roadside reflectors (price tag: about $10,000 per mile) to convert a car's headlight beam into a multicolored moving light "fence." The unnatural light pattern startles animals into stopping until cars pass. Deer-vehicle collisions dropped by 68 percent along U.S. Highway 36 near Boulder after the devices were installed there. Another high-tech fix being tested in 12 states: a sensor system linked to flashing roadside signs that tell drivers when animals are in the road.
Other strategies may be even better. In 2003, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found the best way to cut animal-car crashes was to fence off roads and build under- and overpasses for animals to use. It's not cheap. One estimate pegs fence-building at $42,000 per mile (for one side of the road). Underpasses can cost millions.
In another approach, researchers are studying whether birth-control drugs -- now awaiting FDA approval -- might help control the number of deer. Then there's "herd reduction," aka hunting. "It's very effective," says Allan Williams, the insurance institute's former chief scientist. "And it's very controversial."
Killer Trees
The sky was clear on September 21, 2004, as Harris Township, Minnesota, maintenance workers Kenneth Johnson, 42, and James Booth, 40, drove their pickup truck down Lakeview Drive near Lake Pokegama. They had no idea that 10 yards off the road a 50-foot oak was set to fall and crush them to death. To the untrained eye, the tree looked fine. "It had green leaves on it, but once it fell, you could see the inside was really rotted through," says Dennis Kortekaas, the township board's former chairman.Instances of trees smashing into moving vehicles are rare, but anecdotal evidence says they're increasing. Federal highway statistics show trees killed, at most, one person a year between 1999 and 2003, but Reader's Digest found five tree-related deaths in 2004 alone, and serious crashes in New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee and Louisiana. One of the worst was in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
About 6 p.m. on April 19, 2004, Stephen Spruck, his wife, Suzana Dedivanaj-Spruck, and their 6-month-old daughter, Kristina, were headed home on the Saw Mill River Parkway when a 50-year-old ash crashed onto their Toyota 4Runner. Crushed like a tinfoil ball, the SUV veered off the road, rolling several times before coming to an upside-down stop. Stephen and Suzana were dead. Kristina, strapped into her car seat, survived with minor injuries.
School principal Tatiana Ferraro was coming from the opposite way when she saw the tree begin to fall. "It was like watching something in slow motion," she says.
After the crash, Frank Buddingh, a local arborist, contacted the state transportation department to offer his expertise. Upon meeting with state officials, Buddingh says, he was amazed to find that New York didn't have a standard protocol for tree evaluation. On the drive home, he reports, he spied some 300 trees in need of removal: "They were either dead or dying, and potentially able to collapse. Trees like that weigh tons; they'll penetrate your car like a spear."
Transportation department spokesman Robert Dennison disputes Buddingh's claim. In New York's Hudson Valley region (which includes the Saw Mill parkway), Dennison says, workers cut down 5,000 trees each year. (Citing pending litigation, he declined comment on the tree that killed the Sprucks or on eyewitness accounts of extensive tree-removal work on the parkway after the accident.)
The tree trouble is sure to get worse, says Bruce Fraidech, a vice president at Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories in Charlotte, North Carolina, because many of those planted as the suburbs began to form after World War II are nearing their end. The problem has grown dire enough to attract government scrutiny. Joseph O'Brien, a United States Department of Agriculture plant pathologist in Minnesota, and several colleagues began to detect an uptick in tree failures several years ago. They responded by compiling the first comprehensive guide for communities to manage tree risk. Since its 2003 publication, nine municipalities have convened workshops on how to use the manual.
O'Brien notes that when budgets are tight, tree care isn't always a priority. Not so in Greenburgh, New York. Two years ago, the town paid $9 million to settle a tree-related lawsuit. Now, says town supervisor Paul Feiner, the town spends more than $100,000 a year on inspecting and removing trees, and residents are urged to report troubled trees. What do they look for? Dead branches; big cracks in the trunk; missing or sunken bark; small, off-color leaves; and exposed or damaged roots. Says Feiner: "Who would've thought that in addition to worrying about a nearby nuclear plant and being the target of terrorism, we'd have to worry about trees?"
Deadly Debris
Around midnight on February 22, 2004, Maria Federici was driving her 2001 Jeep Liberty south on Interstate 405 near Seattle, on her way home from her bartending job. Up ahead, a wall unit fell from a U-Haul trailer. Federici collided with the piece of furniture, whose base alone weighed 50 pounds, as it hit the pavement. As the wooden structure burst apart, big chunks flew into her SUV, piercing the grille and popping the hood. One five-foot piece shot through the gap below the open hood and the windshield. It hit Federici in the head, shattering her face.Anthony Cox, an off-duty Seattle bus driver, was the first to pull over. "One side of her face was completely gone, just ripped off," Cox says.
Surgeons worked nearly 16 hours to rebuild her face. Extensive rehabilitation followed. Federici can talk now, but can't see, smell or taste. She suffers severe headaches and regular numbness on her left side.
Not long after Federici's accident, the nonprofit AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety issued a sobering report on vehicular debris, which the group conservatively estimates causes 25,000 accidents and up to 90 deaths a year (the group's definition of a debris-related fatality differs from the one used by Reader's Digest in tallying 427 deaths in 2003). The worst part: "Most of these are preventable," says Gerry Forbes, the study's lead researcher.
The group blames the problem in part on the absence of tough penalties. The federal government lets states regulate debris issues. Punishment often is a citation and small fine for littering or failure to secure a load.
In Federici's case, authorities traced a fingerprint on one wood shard to James Hefley, 28. He was later fined $388 for failing to secure a load and depositing debris, plus $640 for driving with a suspended license and without insurance. Prosecutors considered pressing tougher charges, but didn't.
"We would have had to prove that Hefley knew he lost his load and that the debris had caused Maria's accident," says Dan Donohoe, spokesman for the King County prosecutor. "And we couldn't."
AAA Foundation president Peter Kissinger says the outcome isn't unusual: "In most states, the fine for littering is higher than the fine for an improperly secured load."
Sometimes, victims can exact more justice by suing. In a civil trial last September, American Compressed Steel, Inc., a Kansas City, Missouri, scrap metal firm, was ordered to pay $3 million to the state and the family of Patricia Walker. The 25-year-old woman was killed in 2001 when a 37-pound metal plate that came off a company truck flew through her windshield.
The AAA Foundation reported that commercial trucks are the top violators in debris accidents, including the failure to secure loads. The most common form of truck debris: Pieces of blown tires, which multiple studies have shown could be reduced if drivers improved tire maintenance and inflated tires properly. "The commercial side of trucking needs to do a better job of inspecting and maintaining their vehicles," Kissinger says.
Trucking industry representatives object. "We're subject to very strict federal load securement regulations," says Mike Russell, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, a trade group. The real violators, he says, are do-it-yourselfers piling up their vehicles at home improvement stores.
Some states are cracking down on debris dumpers. Washington has now made it a crime to fail to secure a load that leads to physical injury. Conviction can result in a year in jail and $5,000 in fines. South Carolina lawmakers are considering a similar law.
State senator David Thomas proposed that bill after the death last year of a 9-year-old boy whose cousin drove over a large piece of metal, leading to a blown tire and a succession of rollovers. The culprit: a hook from a car-carrier truck -- a hunk of metal not so different from the one that, six years earlier, killed Alan Pakula.
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