More than $259 billion dollars are spent on alcohol per year in America. Fifty-one percent of Americans go to the bar at least once a week. Nearly 3% of alcohol is stolen. More than 9% of Americans drink daily, as 29 million people are alcoholics in the U.S. More than 18 million people are impaired while driving, having about one million DUI charges. And every 15 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies in an accident due to those who drive under the influence.
Despite how preventable it is, driving under the influence is devastatingly one of the most common types of accidents we have in America.
In 2022, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 37 people in the United States die in drunk driving crashes every day. That’s one person every 39 minutes.
Alcohol-related crashes have gone up by thousands since 2018 to 2023 with a total of 12,947 accidents. Just Las Vegas itself has been claimed to be one of the most dangerous cities due to its 8,580 drunk driving accidents.
Back in 2009, CCSD acknowledged this matter and decided to bring awareness to this issue creating the “Every 15 Minutes” program.
The Every 15 Minutes program is a two-day project that challenges high-schoolers to think about drinking, driving, personal safety, the responsibility of making mature decisions, and the impact their decisions have on family, friends, their community, and many others. Every other year, Boulder City High School takes time to create this demonstration for students to witness.
BCHS has recently been working on their reenactment of the Every 15 Minutes project for students to see on March 13 and 14. Students at BCHS will have the opportunity to sign up to participate in this program and 12 will be chosen to act in the presentation and represent the care that BCHS takes, with the help of national awareness agencies, in representing these serious topics. These students will have to be without any sort of connections to family or friends for two days in order to make it more realistic. On top of that realism, police officers will go to their parents’ door saying that their child has been in a drunk driving accident and did not make it out. Barbara Agostini, registrar and counseling secretary at BCHS, is the administrator for this program. She has been taking initiative for the program alongside School Resource Officer Eric Prunty and firefighter Brian Shea, who have also been greatly involved.
The reenactment consists of a live crash of two vehicles tangled together being pulled apart with the volunteered students in them. Students are pulled out of class to see the collision, detachment of the cars, and their friends and peers in a fatal wreck. While the cars are being cut open to detach them, the victims who are alive are removed by ambulance and taken away by helicopter. After this, a video will be presented to the students of the victims during the accident, while in the hospital, and in court. When asked about the process, Agostini said, “The Every 15 Minutes program takes many months to plan. We have to coordinate with BC Police, BC Fire, Big John’s Towing, BC Hospital, Mercy Air, BC courts, and speakers.”
The purpose of Every 15 Minutes is to reduce alcohol-related incidents, especially among young people. It is to encourage everyone to not drive under the influence and to think about not yourself but your family, friends, and even the community that you affect when you drive under the influence. So that the next time high-schoolers go drinking at that house party or bonfire with college kids who think it is rebellious to provide them with alcohol, they can think twice. People never think it is them in that situation, until it is.