Casualties Soar as Major Traffic Accident Rates Head for Record

Los Angeles Police Sgt. Dennis Zine was going over the latest San Fernando Valley traffic accident statistics with a visitor when word came in that a “K”--police jargon for a traffic accident in which someone is killed--had just occurred on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Chatsworth.

The accident, in which a 32-year-old man was killed when a large truck lost its drive shaft and brakes and rolled backwards, hitting seven cars, was the 58th fatal crash in the Valley this year. Less than five hours later, a second collision, on the same street and only half a mile from the earlier crash, claimed the life of a man whose car crossed traffic lanes and hit a truck head-on.

Fatal crashes have become almost a daily occurrence for the 200 officers and investigators of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Valley Traffic Division who patrol the area’s streets and investigate accidents. For the officers, the two accidents May 23 on Topanga Canyon were a blunt reminder that the Valley this year is experiencing an unusually high number of fatal traffic crashes--23% more than over the same period last year.

48 Fatal Accidents

Of the 118 fatal traffic accidents on surface streets reported as of May 14 in the Los Angeles Police Department’s four traffic divisions, 48, nearly half of the city’s total, occurred in the Valley, police said.

Valley streets also accounted for more than a third of the 671 major-injury accidents reported in Los Angeles in the first four months of this year, police statistics show.

In the past, the Valley has had about the same number of fatal accidents per capita as other areas of the city, but “this year, we’ll probably set some new record,” said Detective Anthony Bartolotto of the Valley Traffic Division.

Of the four traffic divisions, only South, which serves south Los Angeles, has experienced a greater increase in traffic deaths than has the Valley. The other two divisions, West and Central, have both had significant decreases.

The Valley’s rate of fatal and major-injury accidents has increased even though enforcement is up--felony traffic arrests in the area were up 140% in the first four months this year over the same period last year, Bartolotto said. Stiffer drunk-driving sentences, intensive driving awareness programs and a crackdown on motorists with revoked or suspended licenses also have failed to reverse the trend, Zine and Bartolotto said.

Irresponsible Drivers

Zine blames the increase on a general rise in sloppy, irresponsible and intoxicated driving in the Valley this year.

As of May 31, drunk driving caused 23% more fatal accidents in the Valley than it did last year during the same period, said George Callandrillo of the Police Department’s traffic coordination section. Fatal crashes caused by speeding jumped 60% in the Valley, and the number of pedestrians killed in crosswalks rose from none during the first five months of last year to three this year, Callandrillo said.

In addition, during the first four months of this year, signal violations and violations of pedestrians’ right-of-way each were responsible for 66.7% more fatal crashes in the Valley than over the same period last year, Zine said.

Of the four traffic divisions, the Valley during the first five months of this year showed the largest increase in the number of fatal accidents caused by drunk driving, followed by the Westside, which experienced a 20% rise, Callandrillo said. By contrast, the other two divisions showed marked declines, he said. The rise in the number of Valley traffic deaths caused by speeding ranked second among the divisions, he said.

Also, hit-and-run accidents accounted for a startling 51% of the 16,700 reported accidents in the Valley last year, an increase of 6 percentage points over the previous year and 10 percentage points over 1986, police statistics show. Although the numbers are about even with those in the other three Los Angeles police traffic divisions, they are far higher than the statewide average of 10% last year.

“That’s an incredibly high number,” Zine said. “It’s all reflective of people’s attitudes. We have a lot of careless, incompetent and irresponsible drivers . . . and that’s taking its toll.”

Careless driving is not unique to the Valley, but its effects are often deadlier here because of rampant speeding on the area’s notoriously long, wide streets, authorities said.

“You’ve got a lot of race tracks out there,” Callandrillo said. “That’s unique to the Valley. The streets are straighter, they’re flatter, they don’t have a lot of curves. You really get cooking.”

Some of the better-known unofficial speedways, Callandrillo said, are Parthenia Street and Roscoe, Balboa, Reseda and Victory boulevards. When cars speeding 60 to 70 m.p.h. on those streets get into accidents, the results more often than not are deadly, police said, and many such accidents render cars--and sometimes their occupants--unrecognizable.

‘War Zones’

Police described the scenes of several recent accidents in the Valley variously as “war zones,” “destruction zones” and “battlefields.”

On April 17, for example, a man authorities said was under the influence of drugs raced his Camaro against traffic down Plummer Street in Sepulveda, causing an accident that killed two people, injured six others and left five cars damaged. There was nothing left of the Camaro but a crumpled heap of metal and glass, and firefighters had to use a special hydraulic rescue device to free the driver.

“It looked like a bomb went off,” one officer said.

The driver of the Camaro, 34-year-old Michael Mare Jr., of Arleta, has been charged with two counts of murder stemming from the crash.

The crash is an example of the often deadly consequences of driving while intoxicated at high speeds on the Valley’s long, straight boulevards, police said.

Despite tougher drunk-driving sentences passed by the state Legislature last year, drunk-driving arrests in the Valley rose 4% in the first four months of this year over the same period last year, from 3,134 to 3,255, Callandrillo said. The other traffic divisions have all experienced declines in drunk-driving arrests, he said.

Police in the Valley have tried a myriad of approaches to deal with careless and intoxicated driving, but so far, Zine said, the results have been mixed.

Bar Crackdown

Three weeks ago, police launched a stepped-up enforcement program targeting patrons of 56 bars and restaurants in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division, which encompasses Pacoima, Sylmar and Lake View Terrace. The effort is a response to the area’s high number of drunk-driving accidents and arrests, which are more numerous than in any of the Police Department’s 17 other divisions, statistics show.

Also, officers routinely visit schools to warn parents and teen-agers to drive safely near schools, Zine said.

An effort has been under way for the past year to impound vehicles owned by people with revoked or suspended licenses. Police want to get those vehicles off the streets because their drivers, afraid of being caught for driving without a valid license, are more likely to flee the scene after causing an accident, Zine said.

Ticketing Teams

In addition, police recently began dispatching teams of motorcycle officers to issue tickets to speeding motorists on roads that are known for unsafe driving, Zine said. Following the May 23 accidents that killed two people on the same stretch of Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Chatsworth, motorcycle officers armed with radar guns converged on a 1.5-mile stretch of the boulevard and issued more than 60 speeding tickets in one hour, Zine said.

“The problem is the people that blatantly violate those speed laws,” he said. “If you don’t have the speed involved, you’re not going to have an accident.”

But, Zine said, the enforcement efforts, which sometimes result in short-term improvements, have not significantly reduced the number of fatal and major injury accidents.

“We are trying with our resources to address the problems in the Valley, and we’re trying to stay one step in front of the problems,” Zine said. “But we are just inundated with traffic problems in the Valley.”