Road safety on the Fourth goes beyond alcohol

Independence Day is known for parties and celebrations. And not too surprisingly, it’s also one of the deadliest days of the year, in terms of alcohol-related crashes.

Over the last three years, there have been 17 alcohol-related fatal crashes in Oregon over the Fourth of July holiday, which is as many as New Year’s and Labor Day combined over that time span. It’s an average of 5 1/2 per year, which accounts for more than half of all fatal crashes on the holiday.

As a result, police departments will be working long hours, but that does not always translate to high numbers of DUII arrests. There are many other things to monitor.

“Any sort of alcohol- or drug-fueled disputes or domestic violence incidents — we also are responding to several calls of illegal fireworks throughout the city, and we attempt to get to all of those in a reasonable amount of time,” Redmond Police Lt. Curtis Chambers said Tuesday.

In Redmond last year, there were two DUII arrests on the Fourth, none the year before, and one in 2015. In Bend, two DUII arrests were made each of the last two years, and in 2015 there were three.

“Impaired driving enforcement is extremely important, but there’s a lot of priority calls that come in, or high-level risk of injury to one of our community members or visitors,” Bend Police Lt. Clint Burleigh said. “We want to make sure we handle those as much as we can. But if we do come across an impaired driver, we will make the arrest.”

But alcohol might not be the most dangerous factor on the roads on the holiday. Instead, it could be the sheer number of people here. Since 2012, the July traffic on Highway 20 near Sisters has increased by 23 percent — that’s about 3,000 people.

“You kind of get to a point where there’s a saturation going on, and we certainly approach that over a holiday like this,” ODOT spokesman Peter Murphy said. “You throw in hot weather, you throw in fireworks, you throw in people having a good time, and what you do is you increase the opportunity for things to happen on the highway.”

Murphy urges people to leave an hour or so early for whatever their destination is Wednesday and to take it safe and slow on the roads.