If you happened to be driving by Webster Thomas High School on Wednesday morning, you might have been alarmed to see dozens of firefighters, police officers, EMTs and their emergency vehicles swarming around what appeared to be a horrific accident that had just occurred in front of the school.
The realistic accident scene was actually a very carefully arranged and pre-planned mock DWI scenario. It’s organized bi-annually by our local emergency responders as a training exercise, and hosted by the school district during prom and graduation party season as a serious, real-life lesson for our students.
The scene imagined a two-car accident, caused when a high school student was driving drunk. He rear-ended another car and drove it into a tree, seriously injuring several unrestrained passengers and killing another. (If that scenario sounds familiar, it was designed to mimic a fatal accident which actually happened in Hilton last weekend.)
About 600 juniors and seniors silently watched as, one by one, emergency workers extracted the injured passengers and took them to a waiting ambulance. It was slow going. Windows had to be smashed. The windshields of both cars had to be cut completely off, and the Jaws of Life had to be used to extract several of the passengers.
The drunk driver was unscathed, and with some assistance was able to get out of the car. His passengers, however, most of whom were unrestrained, were taken away on backboards. And the front seat passenger in the car he had hit was dead.
As the firefighters were removing doors and cutting the roof off one car, the driver was taken aside by a police officer, given a field sobriety test and arrested.
The whole scenario only took about 45 minutes, but for these high school students, they might be among the most important 45 minutes of their lives.
Speaking as a mother, I hope the message being shared that day sunk in at least a little bit with everyone. But I know that young people tend to think they’re invincible. Bad stuff like that can happen to someone else, but never to me.
But I couldn’t help thinking back to one of these mock DWI presentations I watched many years ago when I was working at Thomas. In addition to the student actors, the school had brought in the mother of the driver who “died.” She was standing on the school’s front walk when a police officer told her that her son had not survived. As any mother would when given that news, she collapsed with grief. As I watched, I found it easy to imagine how devastated she was, to feel the searing pain of losing a child.
If you have a high school student or know of one, perhaps you can impress that perspective upon him or her: you might think it’s OK to be cavalier with your life, cut corners and take chances. But think of how your parents would feel if a police officer came to their door and told them you were not coming home.
Ever.
See lots more pictures from the demonstration in this slideshow:
The mock DWI demonstration was repeated at Webster Schroeder High School on Friday.
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(posted 6/8/2024)
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Way back when I was in high school, graduated 1968, in our Driver Ed class we were shown a movie with actual real life crashes and the results taken at the crash sites Seeing these actual crashes made such an impression on us back then and I would hope make the same impression today because the kids knew this crash was staged and really did not see the consequences like we did in that movie.
I am not sure if my Comment went through so I wanted to resend it to you via email. Way back when I was in high school (graduated 1968) in our Driver Ed class we were shown a movie with actual crashes and the results taken at the crash sites each time. This made quite an impression I can tell you. Staged crashes are fine but until kids actually see upfront (as in that movie) what a crash looks like with the sirens, maybe car fires, screams and chaos I don’t think they can realize what a crash will result in especially if they are involved in that crash. Kathy HertzelWebster
I remember seeing something like that in driver’s ed as well. I wonder if it’s considered “appropriate” these days.