How can we prevent snowmobile related deaths?
Snowmobiles aren’t intended to drive on roads. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use the same common sense we do behind the steering wheels of our cars. Snowmobiles go as fast or faster than our cars, but that doesn’t mean we should look at them as having on-off switches like a child’s toy. They do have throttle and brake levers, so drivers can control them.
I read all the time that snowmobiles are unsafe machines. It just isn’t true. Snowmobile related deaths are generally the result of unsafe drivers, not unsafe machines.
A SnowRider reader sent me the following picture taken on Lake Louise in Alaska.
It’s beautiful–isn’t it? In Churchill, Manitoba, I saw dozens of them, even more sculpted as the ice heaved up chunks of ice. There, they called them hummocks. However, the reader wasn’t commenting on them as a piece of art, but rather as an obstacle that could prove dangerous to snowmobile drivers leaving the marked trail across the lake and putting the throttle down.
The ten people who didn’t hit inanimate objects died the following ways: two went through the ice and drowned (one a nine year-old girl seatbelted into a two-seater snowmobile); one hit a barbed wire fence; three hit vehicles; three hit other snowmobiles; and one was in a single vehicle rollover.
Fourteen of those deaths, or 54%, had alchohol as a factor. Twenty-two of those fatalities, or 85%, were not wearing a Wisconsin safety-certified helmet. There is no magic age where snowmobilers drive safer–three of the fatalities were over 60.
We’re experienced drivers dying out here. Why? The majority of these people lost their lives running into something they should have been able to avoid. All of these people should still be alive.
Safe snowmobiling is a high priority.
by Linda Aksomitis,
Managing Editor for SnowRider Online Magazine
and www.guide2travel.ca
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