I was a passenger in my friend’s car going down I-40 East in North Carolina at around 2 am in the morning when all of a sudden a deer hopped out into the road. We had to swerve to avoid hitting it, losing control of the car in the process. The car slammed right into the guardrail and did a 360-degree turn upon impact. We all immediately got out of the now wrecked car after putting the hazard lights on. It was stuck almost diagonally partly in the right lane. Several cars stopped who saw it happen, and they too started flashing their lights to try to warn drivers from hitting the car.
About 20-25 minutes later, before any police had arrived, another car slammed into ours. The police finally showed up a few minutes after this. My friend’s car is completely totaled. Only a hubcap remains.
This all happened because of a deer in the road. It just leaped away. Would it have been better to not swerve and just hit it? I don’t think so. I saw a car literally flip several times after hitting a deer two years ago.
Deer are menaces to our society. They are really just over sized rodents that cause over a million accidents a year! On average, there are about 1.5 million reported deer vehicle collisions a year in the United States, causing over a billion dollars worth in damage. There are probably even more that are not reported.
The deer often just walk or leap, as the case may be, away, often barely injured.
I looked into the data for deer related crashes in North Carolina and I was a bit shocked by the data. For the past 15 years, the number of deer related crashes in North Carolina has steadily gone up, while the deer population has only slightly increased in that time. Every year a new all time high record is set.
In 1994, there were 8,000 reported deer related collisions in North Carolina. In 2007 there were nearly 20,000 deer vehicle related collisions. The deer data is not organized very well on the Internet, so I had to gather the data from each year myself.
Here is a line graph assembled by me showing the increase in deer related collisions from 1994 to 2007, with a few years missing (because I simply could not find the data):
Click on the graph to explore it in more detail.
Eleven people died from deer vehicle collisions in 2007.
Something needs to be done to get the deer off our roads! Lengthen the deer-hunting season perhaps? Those hunters who killed Bambi’s mother may have been doing us all a favor.
And for those of you who have been thinking: wow I really enjoyed reading that, but I really wish that I could see a blog entry wordled, you are in luck! Here is this entry wordled:
Spitting on a Well-Scrubbed Floor 