Monday, April 1, 2013

DUI Dishonor Roll

Drunk drivers caused 9,878 deaths in 2011.  NO FOOLIN!

I doubt they were celebrating the resurrection of our lord Jesus Christ, but these two almost simultaneous DUI arrests could easily have been burial vault material if not taken off the road by APD very early Good Friday morning.  

Even worse, they could have taken innocent folks with them. Especially since Heidy Canalizo was arrested in the heart of downtown Amherst, near the CVS at 12:47 AM.

Click to enlarge/read






 
And Alex Labib, arrested on Fearing Street (within spitting distance of UMass), at 12:50 AM, was a duel threat: both DUI and possession of narcotic drugs.  Not very becoming for a former UMass Student Government Association Senator.

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Early Thursday morning on Belchertown Road, one of the main roads leading to town center, APD arrested Randy Santiago for DUI and operating to endanger (which is almost redundant).



6 comments:

Dr. Ed said...

No Larry -- facts do matter. Alcohol and or drugs was A factor in that number of fatal accidents, but it did not *cause* all of them!

For example, if a Pine Tree snaps off and falls onto a car and the autopsy finds alcohol, that is listed as an OUI fatality even though alcohol had nothing to do with it -- NO driver could have avoided that.

Another (real) example was out in Ware -- WMECO had increased the voltage but not replaced the old glass insulators with ceramic ones, the pole was not grounded, and it was raining which enabled the wet wood to conduct electricity. Only poles with transformers are required to be grounded, but what most utilities are now doing is running a ground wire from pole to pole which serves to ground the others when they are wet.

A girl --- drunk -- went off the road and hit a pole. That broke one of the glass insulators that shouldn't have been there in the first place. This allowed the electricity to come down the wet wood but for some reason it couldn't go all the way to the ground -- or not enough could to blow the line fuse. Hence the pole was hot as was the car wrapped around it, and while lightning will jump the tires, 8700 volts wasn't enough -- or enough to blow the fuse.

When the passenger stepped out of the wreck, she completed the circuit and was electrocuted.

The driver was convicted of an OUI fatality, which I have a problem with -- fate and defective equipment caused the post-crash fatality.

And a lot of states will report alcohol to 0.01% as an OUI death when it clearly isn't.

Reality is that we have absolutely NO IDEA how many deaths OUI causes each year because our statistics are flawed -- the figures are artificially inflated. It is just like the "body count" figures in Vietnam, and both statistics are equally meaningless.

Some deaths are caused because the driver was drunk. (Or stoned, which no one seems to be talking about with pot essentially 'legal' now in Massachusetts.)

In other cases - likely the majority - the accident was caused by something else, but a sober driver could have reacted and avoided it.

In others -- my issue with the lack of a blinking yellow light at the 116 split -- the drunk driver made a mistake that a sober driver probably wouldn't have made -- but could have.

And then there are the ones where alcohol had nothing to do with it. Larry, if you (sober) are crushed to death by a couple tons of tree falling on you, that is the cause of the accident and it doesn't matter if it is you or someone with a .4 BAC driving the vehicle -- the tree caused the accident.

We are making the same mistake now that we made 60 years ago blaming all auto fatalities on speed. Yes, some were because people drove to fast, but then Ralph Nader came out with his classic Unsafe at any speed and showed how car design didn't help. And a lot of it was OUI -- no one ever worried about it back then.

Facts matter and we well may make the mistake we did with speed limits -- a speeding arrest (which is what a speeding 'ticket' legally is) isn't what it was a half century ago, and if we aren't careful, an OUI arrest likely will become equally trivialized.

Anonymous said...

Awesome, thanks for the link to the sweet Punk BB, Larry!

Larry Kelley said...

You Commented on the wrong post Nitwit. But thanks for reading.

Anonymous said...

We are so glad we left your misery called Amherst several years ago. You people can't agree to disagree. A town without "balls" being led around on a tether by a university that thinks it shit doesn't smell.

Anonymous said...

ummmh... are you sure you left completely?

Anonymous said...

Heidi Canalizzo is our very own Lincoln Real estates girlfriend, Peter Grandonico. She was drinking at Lit.