POINT MUGU : Safety Campaign to Focus on Highway

A 21-mile stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura County that has been the scene of many fatal traffic accidents and hundreds of collisions is the focus of a regional driver safety campaign to be kicked off Friday.

Federal, state, county and private agency representatives will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. Friday at Vista Point next to Mugu Rock to unveil a television, print, radio and billboard campaign, said Staci Morse, a spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol’s Ventura station.

“Anything we can do to reduce the number of fatals and overall accidents out there is obviously a good thing,” Morse said, referring to the stretch of the highway from the Los Angeles County line north to Point Mugu. “If we can prevent even one fatal then we have done good work.”

More than 20 people have died on that stretch of the road since 1989, with the most recent fatal accidents occurring Jan. 7 and Feb. 12 when motorists’ cars careened off the road near Mugu Rock, CHP statistics show. There have also been more than 1,400 collisions and more than 1,100 injuries on the curvy, undivided highway.

The media campaign, organized by a consortium of federal, state, county and private agencies and groups, is financed in part by a $280,000 grant from the National Transportation Safety Administration, said Rick Holland, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation.