FOXNews video segment on FOX & friends Thursday August, 20, 2009: In some cases people are more impaired, mentally, when texting while driving than when driving under the influence of alcohol.
Graphic video PSA for the awareness of the danger of texting while driving is at the bottom of this article.
Texting while driving has become an urgent problem because of the number of people that are involved in careless and inattentive behavior that can cause deadly accidents.
New York started a new law last night at midnight that prohibits the use of cell phones while driving. New York City Police Department now hands out $130 fines if you are caught talking on a cell phone while driving.
CELL PHONE CRASHES
2,600 DEATHS
12,000 SERIOUS INJURIES
636,000 CRASHES FROM CELL PHONES
— National Safety Council (unknown time span)
Just dialing a telephone can take your eyes off of the road 4.6 seconds. A car at traveling 55 mph will travel about 80 feet in 4.6 seconds.
Currently California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington outlaw handheld cell phone use while driving. The City of Chicago already bans cell phone use while driving. The State of Illinois will have a texting-while-driving ban beginning with New Year’s Day 2010.
Today, there are more than 270 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. According to a 2008 national survey, roughly eight in ten (81 percent) of cell phone owners report that they talk on their cell phones while driving and one in five (18 percent) report that they send text messages while driving.
SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.
In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent — compared to Facebook with an increase of 228 percent. Much of Twitter use is conducted via text messaging.
GRAPHIC PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING DANGER OF TEXTING AND DRIVING WITH PORTRAYAL OF A DEADLY CRASH BELOW …
[SPOILERS ARE LISTED BELOW CAPTION OF VIDEO]
SEND THIS VIDEO TO SOMEONE YOU THINK IS AT RISK OF SERIOUSLY INJURING OR KILLING THEMSELVES OR AN INNOCENT PEDESTRIAN, MOTORCYCLIST, BICYCLIST, PASSENGER OR OTHER DRIVER.
What is shown in the graphic PSA on texting from the United Kingdom?
A PSA video has been produced in Wales as part of a 30-minute deterrent movie to educate teens about the dangers of texting while driving.The video shows a teen female driver texting and talking to passengers while driving immediately prior to a head-on collision that kills four people and injures several others. The crash scene, which is disturbing to view for many, is displayed in slow motion — showing the ‘second collisions’ of traumatized bodies and heads hitting the interior frame of the vehicles. The video then proceeds to show a series of events: bystanders approaching the victims in the cars, the first responder response, police management of the accident scene, and firefighter/paramedics in rescue operations with two vehicle extrication procedures occurring simultaneously. One extrication involves prying and cutting driver door hinges and the other extrication involves cutting roof posts of another car to peel back the roof of the car. The video shows authentic spinal stabilization methods with backboards and C-spine precautions by rescue personnel. Most victims are unconscious with bleeding head trauma.
The rescue also shows multiple airlifts by at least two medical transport helicopters (air ambulances) that use landing zones on the highway near the accident scene. The driver of vehicle #2 is unconscious with his children crying for him to wake up. An infant in vehicle #2 appears to be in traumatic cardiac arrest — assumed by the camera’s pause on the infant’s face with non-blinking eyes, fixed and dilated pupils, and lack of crying.
The accident is portrayed to occur near the city limits of Tredegar, which is a town in the county borough of Blaenau Gwent, situated on the River Sirhowy in the Sirhowy Valley in southeast Wales. The Gwent Police (Welsh: Heddlu Gwent) is the territorial police force responsible for policing the local authority areas of Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Monmouthshire, Newport and Torfaen in southeast Wales. The video presented in the UK was performed with local actors and the Gwent police department. Gwent police worked with filmmaker Peter Watkins-Hughes on the video, which stars local drama students Jenny Davies as Cassie, Amy Ingram as Emm, and Laura Quantick as Jules.
The first bystander who arrives to help the accident victims appears to speak something in Cymraeg (Welsh) spoken natively in Wales. The uniform of one of the officers has a banner on the back of his uniform that displays HEDDLU, which is the Welsh word for ‘police’ and refers to one of the four police forces in Wales. Accidents in Wales are called Road Traffic Collisions (RTC). In the United states they are called Motor Vehicle Accidents (MVA) or Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC).
See related links …
jawsoflife.com — Official site of HURST JAWS OF LIFE
gwent.police.uk — Official site of Gwent Police
south-wales.police.uk — Official site of South Wales Police