Roughly 1,000 San Marcos High School students quietly watched one of their peers scream and cry as Santa Barbara County firefighters extracted her recently deceased friend from a wrecked car.
Even though the entire crash scene was staged — from the blood on the windows to the ambulances and police cars that pulled up blaring their sirens — the consequences of driving drunk were driven home for the students in the most visceral way possible.
The Every 15 Minutes program, held at San Marcos High School for the sixth time in 12 years, is a California Highway Patrol-led effort to deter the high school juniors and seniors in attendance from getting behind the wheel while intoxicated.
The two-day program started Tuesday with the mock collision.
What looked like two cars sitting in one of the school parking lots — windows smashed, the hoods crumpled up — unfolded into a traumatic collision scene as the student actors realized that some of the passengers in their cars weren’t waking up.
Within minutes, Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies, paramedics, and firefighters were pulling into the parking lot to question the students, pull their “deceased” friends from the cars and carry them away on gurneys.
“Students walk away with a different understanding, especially because some of their friends were involved in the situation,” said CHP Officer Dylan Youngblood, who took part in the collision, of the program’s effectiveness. “So it kind of hits home.”
According to the program, its name comes from the average amount of time between alcohol-related traffic-collision deaths in the United States.
Every 15 minutes during the school day, a volunteer student leaves his or her classroom and returns with skull-like face paint and a coroner’s tag and, as a symbolic victim of a DUI crash, doesn’t interact with his or her peers the rest of the day.
The greater narrative around Tuesday’s mock collision and what its “victims” and “driver” subsequently go through will come together Wednesday at an assembly in the school auditorium.
With prom approaching, the program came at a fitting time, Youngblood said, adding that the easy availability of on-demand ride services such as Uber have reduced instances of drunk driving.
“People really need to have an understanding that a small decision that you think is inconsistent with drunk driving really is consistent with it,” he said.
“Thinking ‘Oh, I’m just a block away’ can result in you going through an intersection and not realizing it’s a red light,” which can result in the type of accident the students witnessed Tuesday, he said.
The program is funded through a grant by the California Office of Traffic Safety that comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
