Thirty-nine citations issued during recent sTEP program

Thirty-nine citations and 135 warnings were issued during the recent Special Traffic Enforcement Program (sTEP) by the Mt. Pleasant Police Department.

Also during the program, which ran from Aug. 23 to Sept. 5, 17 accidents were investigated and there were 47 motorist assists.

Mt. Pleasant Police Department officials said the numbers were higher than usual due to the Midwest Old Threshers reunion. A dozen officers from the local department participated in the program.

The sTEP projects are funded by the Governor?s Traffic Safety Bureau through a program with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA). The funding enables officers to work more hours on roadways across the state during times of the year when travel increases and traffic crashes, injury and death are most probable.

Almost one-third of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States and Iowa involve drunk drivers. That means an average of 10,000 people in the United States have died needlessly every year since 2010.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 28 people, nationwide, die every day in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver.

This amounts to one death every 53 minutes. During the 2014 (2015 statistics are unavailable) Labor Day holiday weekend, 40 percent of the fatalities in traffic crashes involved drunk drivers, which was the highest percentage in over five years.

In contrast, the simple act of wearing a seat belt is the single most effective thing a driver or passenger can do to protect themselves in a crash.

A NHSTA report shows that seat belts save over 13,000 lives per year. This is more than the population of most Iowa towns and it only takes approximately four seconds to buckle up.