by Cary McNeal
FACT 705 In the United States, one life is lost every twenty minutes as a result of an alcohol-related car crash.
FACT 706 Alcohol-related accidents have resulted in the deaths of more than 394,000 people in the past twenty years.
FACT 707 More than 17,000 people are killed each year in alcohol-related accidents. That’s more than 325 a week and 46 every day.
FACT 708 Our nation’s capital is home to America’s most crash-prone drivers. The average Washington, D.C., driver is involved in a crash once every 4.8 years, compared with a national average of once every ten years. If you’ve ever driven there, this won’t surprise you.
FACT 709 After Washington, D.C., the most dangerous cities to drive in are Baltimore, Maryland; Providence, Rhode Island; Hialeah, Florida; and Glendale, California.
FACT 710 According to a 2005 poll by the National Sleep Foundation, 60 percent of adult drivers—about 168 million people—say they have driven a vehicle in the past year while feeling drowsy.
FACT 711 More than a third of those polled (37 percent or 103 million people) admit to having fallen asleep at the wheel. Of those who have nodded off, 13 percent say they have done so at least once a month.
FACT 712 Four percent—approximately eleven million drivers—admitted in the poll that they have had an accident or near accident because they fell asleep or were too tired to drive.
FACT 713 NHTSA estimates that driver fatigue is the cause of a hundred thousand police-reported crashes every year. Accidents caused by drowsy driving result in an estimated 1,550 deaths, seventy-one thousand injuries, and $12.5 billion in monetary losses per year.
FACT 714 In a recent study of turn signal usage by twelve thousand vehicles, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) found that the rate of turn signal neglect for vehicles changing lanes is 48 percent. Vehicles making turns improperly used turn signals only 25 percent of the time.
FACT 715 The SAE extrapolated these findings to include all U.S. drivers, and the results suggest that turn signal neglect occurs more than 2 billion times a day, or 750 billion times a year.
FACT 716 The study suggests that turn signal neglect is responsible for up to 2 million accidents per year, more than twice the number of collisions caused by distracted driving.
FACT 717 The deadliest bus accident in American history happened in May 1988 when a church bus full of kids was hit head-on by a drunk driver going the wrong direction down Interstate 71 near Carrollton, Kentucky. Of the sixty-six passengers on the bus, twenty-seven died and thirty-four were injured, most of them severely.
FACT 718 The drunk driver who caused the Carrollton crash, Larry Wayne Mahoney, was sentenced to sixteen years in jail.
FACT 719 In 1990, dense morning fog was to blame for a seventy-five-car pileup on Interstate 75 in Tennessee that stretched for half a mile and caused fifteen deaths.
FACT 720 Signs warning motorists of fog had been posted in the area but were unreadable after foggy conditions deteriorated too rapidly.
FACT 721 Seven people were killed on July 4, 1998, on Virginia’s Interstate 81 when a car hydroplaned during a storm, sailed across the median, and collided head-on with a tractor trailer. The six people in the car and the truck driver died.
FACT 722 Ice and snow caused at least twenty automobile accidents in Washington County, Maryland, on January 19, 2009. The worst of these was a pileup involving seven tractor trailers and thirty-five cars that claimed two lives and injured thirty-five people.
FACT 723 The worst auto accident in Virginia history happened on February 22, 2000, when a sudden snowstorm on Interstate 95 in Stafford County caused a 117-vehicle pileup that killed one and injured thirty-one.
FACT 724 While just under 4,900 female drivers died in U.S. traffic accidents in 2009, more than 11,900 American males died in automobile accidents in the same year.
FACT 725 A recent study based on data from 1999 to 2004 shows that fatality rates for drivers rise after age sixty-five. The higher the pants, the higher the death toll.
FACT 726 The fatality rate for drivers age eighty-five and older is almost four times higher than that of teen drivers.
FACT 727 The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there will be 9.6 million people age eighty-five and older by 2030, 73 percent more than today.
FACT 728 Elderly drivers are less likely to be in accidents caused by high speeds or alcohol, but more likely than other drivers to get into collisions when missing a stop sign or turning into oncoming traffic.
FACT 729 George Russell Weller, then eighty-six, killed ten people and injured more than seventy when he drove his Buick Le Sabre into a crowded farmers’ market in Santa Monica, California, in 2003. His attorneys explained that Weller had confused his car’s accelerator for the brake. He was convicted of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence.
FACT 730 A judge ruled that Weller was too ill to be imprisoned and sentenced him to probation and $101,700 in penalties. The case fueled a nationwide debate over how elderly drivers should be screened. Being able to tell the difference between the gas pedal and the brake would be a good place to start.
FACT 731 NHTSA defines aggressive driving as “the operation of a motor vehicle in a manner that endangers or is likely to endanger persons or property.” Aggressive driving is a traffic offense, not a criminal one.
FACT 732 Examples of aggressive driving cited by NHTSA include speeding or driving too fast for conditions, improper lane changing, tailgating, improper passing, or having those obnoxious plastic testicles hanging off the back of your truck.
FACT 733 Road rage can have fatal consequences. When a forty-nine-year-old Houston man blew his horn at a car that cut him off in 2010, the other driver chased the man down the freeway and shot him to death.
FACT 734 Two men were injured, one critically, when an October 2013 fender bender involving a motorcycle and a Range Rover on the Henry Hudson Parkway in New York City erupted into road rage. The Range Rover was chased by at least thirty bikers and cornered in traffic; the driver was pulled from his vehicle by several bikers and beaten in front of his family.
FACT 735 Road rage and aggressive driving cause eight hundred deaths a year on British roads, according to a 2010 survey by insurance company AXA.
FACT 736 More than half of the AXA survey respondents had been subjected to a “significant” act of road rage—shouting and aggression, not just a honk of the horn or a hand gesture.
FACT 737 Fifty-three percent of survey respondents admitted to behaving aggressively behind the wheel “sometimes,” while nearly 20 percent admitted to behaving aggressively “often.”
FACT 738 In 2013, the state of Ohio was ordered to pay more than $3 million for failing to fix potholes after the 2008 death of a Columbiana County nurse. The forty-nine-year-old woman was killed when a truck hit potholes and swerved head-on into her vehicle.
FACT 739 In November 1991, seventeen people were killed and 150 were injured when blinding dust storms across Interstate 5 near Coalinga, California, sent ninety-three cars and eleven tractor trailers smashing into one another in one of the worst chain-reaction accidents in U.S. history.
FACT 740 From 1996 through 2000, 1,753 people died and thousands more were injured in wrong-way crashes on America’s freeways.
FACT 741 Wrong-way crashes generally result in a high proportion of deaths and serious injuries.
FACT 742 In June 2002, a van carrying twenty-seven suspected illegal immigrants drove into oncoming traffic with its headlights off on Interstate 8 east of San Diego. The van crashed head-on into an SUV, killing six people and seriously injuring several others.
IF YOU DON’T THINK the 1970s were scary, you weren’t there. I was, and I remember when my parents stopped letting my s
ister and me watch the nightly news because it became too frightening for children. It was too frightening for everyone, really, these endless stories about the Vietnam War, demonstrations, shootings at Kent State, Watergate, the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Munich, the PLO, the Manson family, Patty Hearst and the SLA, the Iran hostage crisis, the oil crisis, and more. No wonder everyone was doing drugs back then.
FACT 743 Stephen King came up with the idea for Carrie while cleaning the women’s locker room in his job as a school janitor. He probably came up with Misery while cleaning the men’s.
FACT 744 In 1974, local news reporter Christine Chubbuck shot herself on live television in Sarasota, Florida, making her the first suicide broadcast on TV.
FACT 745 Chubbuck had a script that described the shooting in the third person, accurately predicting how she was taken to the hospital in critical condition.
FACT 746 The Vietcong put explosives in empty soda cans after noticing that American soldiers liked to kick them as they walked.
FACT 747 Of the four students shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970, only two were participating in antiwar demonstrations at the time. The other two students were walking to class.
FACT 748 At 4:00 A.M. on May 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon made an unplanned visit to the Lincoln Memorial to chat with antiwar protestors gathered there. The head of his Secret Service detail described it in his diary as “the weirdest day so far.” Which, in the Nixon White House, was saying something.
FACT 749 Before the shootings at Kent State, President Nixon was quoted complaining about student protesters, calling them “bums . . . blowing up campuses.”
FACT 750 Some people suggested that actor Ben Stein was the Watergate whistleblower “Deep Throat.” Stein was a speechwriter for President Nixon at the time. He can be seen crying in footage of Nixon’s resignation speech to his staffers.
FACT 751 All American currency was backed by gold until 1971, when President Nixon passed a series of laws that canceled the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold and ushered in the era of freely floating currencies that remains to the present day.
FACT 752 Thirty-seven hundred people were arrested during the 1977 blackout in New York, the biggest mass arrest in the city’s history.
FACT 753 During the 1977 New York City blackout, looters and vandals caused $300 million worth of damage, breaking into more than sixteen hundred businesses and setting more than a thousand fires.
FACT 754 In the days leading up to the 1972 Munich Olympics, security expert Dr. Georg Sieber warned Munich officials of the possibility of a terrorist attack eerily similar to the one that would occur at the games. His advice was ignored.
FACT 755 Security was purposely lax at the Munich Olympics. German officials hoped to present a more unthreatening and carefree image of their country than the world had last seen at the 1936 games there during Hitler’s reign.
FACT 756 At the Munich Olympics, American athletes unknowingly helped Palestinian terrorists gain access to the Olympic Village.
FACT 757 In 1979, an unlikely series of mechanical and human errors at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, caused a partial meltdown of the reactor core and a release of significant amounts of radioactive gases into the atmosphere.
FACT 758 The near-total devastation of the nuclear power industry resulted, as the disaster at Three Mile Island tipped the scales in the ongoing controversy over nuclear power in favor of those opposed to it.
FACT 759 Massive demonstrations followed the Three Mile Island accident, culminating in a rally in New York City that attracted upward of two hundred thousand people. By the mid-1980s, the construction of nuclear power plants in the United States had virtually ceased.
FACT 760 On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than sixty American hostages.
FACT 761 The immediate cause of the Iran hostage crisis was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah into the United States for medical treatment, but the event was also a dramatic way for student revolutionaries to break with Iran’s past and put an end to American interference in its affairs.
FACT 762 Iranian students freed their American hostages on January 21, 1981, 444 days after the crisis began and just hours after newly elected president Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.
FACT 763 In one of the most horrific incidents of violence against civilians during the Vietnam War, a company of American soldiers killed the majority of the population of the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai in March 1968.
FACT 764 Though exact numbers remain unconfirmed, it is believed that as many as five hundred people, including women, children, and the elderly, were killed in the My Lai massacre.
FACT 765 In 1970, a U.S. Army board charged fourteen officers with crimes related to the events at My Lai; only one was convicted.
FACT 766 The brutality of the My Lai killings and the extent of the cover-up exacerbated growing antiwar sentiment in the United States and further divided the nation over the continuing American presence in Vietnam.
FACT 767 On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of publishing billionaire William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her Berkeley, California, apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a radical activist group.
FACT 768 Two months after her abduction, a gun-toting Patty Hearst was seen on security cameras participating in the SLA’s armed robbery of a San Francisco bank. A taped message from the SLA soon followed in which Hearst claimed she had voluntarily joined the group and changed her name to “Tania.”
FACT 769 After police and FBI killed most of the SLA members in a shootout in Los Angeles in May 1974, Hearst disappeared for over a year before she was found in September 1975.
FACT 770 Despite her argument that she had been coerced into joining the SLA through repeated rape, isolation, and brainwashing, Patty Hearst was convicted of armed robbery in 1976.
FACT 771 President Jimmy Carter commuted Patty Hearst’s sentence after she had served almost two years in prison. She was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton in January 2001.
FACT 772 In 1978, former board of supervisors member Dan White shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall in San Francisco, California. White had reportedly been angry about Moscone’s decision not to reappoint him to the city board.
FACT 773 Harvey Milk was one of the nation’s first openly gay politicians and a much-admired activist in San Francisco. His and Moscone’s murders were followed by demonstrations—some of them violent—as the city publicly mourned their loss.
FACT 774 Dan White pleaded a “diminished capacity” defense, claiming that distress over losing his job caused him to suffer mental problems. In 1979, White was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to just seven years in jail.
FACT 775 White’s sentence caused such widespread public outrage that California revoked the diminished capacity defense in subsequent cases.
FACT 776 Dan White was released from prison in 1984 after serving five years of his sentence. He was unable to resume a normal life, and committed suicide in 1985.
YOU KNOW WHAT WAS frightening about the 1980s? I mean besides Cyndi Lauper and acid-washed jeans and Flock of Seagulls hair? The constant fear of nuclear annihilation, that’s what. The Cold War got scalding hot in the 1980s, and there was a real fear that the Soviet Union was going to wipe us all out at any time. That’s why I liked to live for the moment, and why I kissed that girl I barely knew at a frat party one night in 1983. After which she threw up all over me. Talk about rejection. Worse, she got barf on my Member’s Only jacket
. That was my favorite jacket, and I had to cut off the epaulets because they stunk like vomit. I was not happy about that.
FACT 777 The crew of the doomed 1986 Challenger space shuttle launch likely did not die in the initial explosion, but survived the three-minute fall to the ocean that destroyed the cabin on impact.
FACT 778 The ill-fated Challenger shuttle launch was not shown live on the major broadcast networks, which meant that many of the viewers who saw the shuttle explode on television were young students watching the launch at school via live NASA feeds.
FACT 779 Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who voices Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and other muppets on Sesame Street, was offered a spot on the Challenger space shuttle, but when NASA realized there was no room for the Big Bird puppet in the craft, Spinney’s spot was given to teacher Christa McAuliffe.