COLORADO SPRINGS — Every Wednesday the deadly crash count on Colorado Roads shows up in lights on electronic highway signs. For 2019 is now over 400 deaths. Another telling number it does not reveal is the number of those deaths with suspected impairment involved.
"About a third of our fatals in Colorado every year can be attributed to impaired drivers," said Drive Smart Colorado, Executive Director, Maile Gray. Numbers tracked by the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) show 116 of the 416 Colorado traffic deaths this year fall in the category of suspected impairment.
More CDOT tracking in recent years looked at the blood alcohol level of the more than 22-thouand DUI court cases. The Colorado legal limit is .08, but average level form DUI cases was .164, more than double the limit.
Numbers everyone who drives should know. "We might not be able to put our self in the driver’s seat of that drunk driver,” said Gray, “We certainly know that we have that around us 24 hours a day and we need to be always, ever vigilant."
