In other winter-related news

[jhetley]

Maine recorded four snowmobile deaths over the weekend.  Cute stuff like running right into a car at a road crossing.  Or not putting on a helmet before attempting to climb a tree.  Also several near-misses, such as driving a couple of sleds into open water on a lake.

Culling the herd?  I think some of the casualties were young enough to still be in the breeding pool.

Comments

[ebenstone.livejournal.com]

We've had a similar rash of problems here in Central NY.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

As the EMTs say, "If it weren't for alcohol, tobacco, and stupidity, we'd be out of business."

Most snowmobile accidents involve at least one of the three, and often two. After the month several years back when our local hospital alone had one snowmobile fatality per weekend for seven weeks straight, the local ER nurses had "please don't drink and snowmobile, we're tired of seeing people die in our ER" signs printed up out of their own pocket and posted around town, and the Fish&Game people started lurking in snow-cammy to run random sobriety checkpoints up in the woods. It worked; we haven't had a stretch that bad since.

(Smoking and snowmobiling isn't a big problem, but any day now I expect to hear about somebody who ran his snow machine into a tree because he got distracted trying to light a cigarette without stopping or slacking speed.)

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Apparently we got another one this morning. Quoth the Warden Service, "Alcohol and excessive speed seem to have been factors in the majority of the accidents."

Which raises a question about the use of the term "accident"...