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Published on Thursday, July 31, 2003
in the Orlando Sentinel
When Jacqueline Stidham stopped for a red light one recent rainy afternoon, the truck behind her skidded, jackknifed and crunched her Mazda, turning the street -- which funnels exiting Bee Line traffic onto Orange Blossom Trail -- into a parking lot that stretched into the distance.
She picked a bad day to get hit. The rain was wreaking havoc all over town, so the Florida Highway Patrol didn't get there for an hour. It took more than two hours for traffic to start moving freely again.
"It seemed like it took quite a long time," said Stidham, 45, who was banged up but not seriously hurt in the June 21 accident. "We were really upset from what happened and everything, but based on other problems they were having, I can't really fault them for that."
It's a fact of life in Central Florida: Any random wreck, even a minor one, can snarl roads and inconvenience drivers for hours. In Orange County, it's worse than most.
Orange is one of the few counties in the state -- Osceola is another -- where the Sheriff's Office does not investigate traffic accidents. That means the Florida Highway Patrol has to handle all accidents outside city limits, no matter how minor, even in parking lots or on residential streets.
In Orange, it takes an average of 82 minutes to clear a wreck, the longest response time of any metropolitan area in the state except Miami, according to highway patrol data analyzed by the Orlando Sentinel. One in every four accidents in Orange takes longer than two hours to clear.
"For some reason, it seems to be getting worse," said Orange County Commissioner Ted Edwards, who chairs MetroPlan Orlando, the region's transportation-planning agency. "We're at the stage now where we've come to the conclusion that traffic incidents cause a lot of our congestion."
Today Edwards is calling a summit of law-enforcement and fire and rescue officials and others from Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties to see what can be done.
Experts say that accidents and similar roadway "incidents" such as disabled cars cause up to 60 percent of traffic jams. No one who drives in Central Florida -- where there are no shortages of either accidents or congestion -- would argue.
State troopers worked 40,568 crashes in Orange during the 12-month period that ended April 30, data show.
That's more than twice as many accidents as in any other county in the state, except Miami-Dade, which had 2,000 more accidents, but has 21/2 times as many residents and more traffic on its primary highways. Police in Orlando and other Orange County cities work another 17,000 crashes on their streets each year.
Each year, hundreds of cars crash on Interstate 4, pile up on the East-West Expressway, collide on Colonial Drive, smash on Semoran Boulevard and bend fenders on the Bee Line.
Little help
It's frustrating for the highway patrol, which in Orange is spread thin with just 48 troopers who averaged 845 accidents apiece in the 12-month period. It's maddening for drivers, too. The minor wrecks can take the longest to clear, because they are a lower priority than crashes with injuries or fatalities.
In Seminole and Polk counties, with help from sheriff's offices, the highway patrol manages to clear accidents in less than 70 minutes. Volusia clocks in at 75 minutes. But in Osceola, troopers needed an average of 84 minutes. In Lake, where troopers often face the same kinds of long drives to remote accidents that help slow Osceola response times, they needed 87 minutes on average.
But in Orange, troopers respond to more accidents than in all those counties combined.
"How do we correct this? We can get a lot of staff and enforce traffic laws. Our problem is we're reactive. We're just going from accident to accident. We're not proactive. We're not out there enforcing the law because we're too busy reacting," said Highway Patrol Lt. Anthony DiPace, sub-district commander for Orange and Osceola counties.
But the patrol is reluctant to ask the sheriff for more help. Major Cyrus R. Brown, troop commander for Central Florida, insists the patrol and Sheriff Kevin Beary have a great relationship.
When available, deputy sheriffs sometimes go to an accident scene and help out. But unlike in sheriff's offices in metropolitan Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Jacksonville and Palm Beach, they cannot write reports.
Capt. Bernie Presha, Orange County Sheriff's Office spokesman, said deputies have neither the training nor the time to do crash reports, with all the criminal law enforcement they must do. He said it has been that way "forever," predating Beary.
One of every four crashes handled by the highway patrol is cleared in less than a half-hour. Those typically are minor. In many, drivers simply exchange information and leave, to later fill out self-reporting "blue forms" available from any law enforcement officer.
In the May-April period covered by the Highway Patrol database, 3,586 accidents -- nearly 10 a day -- took longer than three hours. Almost 1,000 of those involved serious injuries or deaths. In most other cases, such as when Stidham's Mazda got rear-ended, troopers or city police simply had too many piling up all at once.
"Come noontime, come 5 or 6 o'clock, or in the morning, when it's rush hour, these individuals must realize that, hey, it is likely that I'm going to have to wait a while," said Orlando police Sgt. Orlando Rolón, spokesman for the department.
It's a scenario that DiPace said troopers know well.
"Tempers can become somewhat frayed," he said. "You get a family, or someone here on vacation and someone gets involved in a crash and it's the hugest trauma to them. Then you throw on top of that the hours of waiting."
Consultant Arland "Ted" Smith of PB Farradyne, who will lead today's summit, said there is a huge economic cost.
"We've got truckloads worth thousands of dollars an hour, just one truckload that doesn't get to the delivery window. Doctors that are late for a surgery. People who don't make it to their planes. Who pays for that? Society," Smith said.
Edwards said he hopes today's dialogue will lead to regionwide policies to cut the time it takes to clear accidents.
Most public safety agencies say they already do everything they can to clear accidents swiftly with the staff they have, but Smith said there's always room for improvement.
Cutting reaction time
Does everyone have clearing accidents as a high priority? Do firetrucks really have to block two lanes? Can technology help? Must troopers handle parking lot accidents, when they could be patrolling highways? Must towing companies wait for the patrol to call?
"None of these is going to be significant alone, but if each player can cut five minutes . . . that makes a huge difference," Smith said.
Help has been coming. The Florida Department of Transportation is paying for 21 more troopers to patrol I-4 starting in January. DiPace is hopeful, but notes his unit has 17 vacant slots he can't fill now, because of lack of money.
Three years ago, the Florida Department of Transportation began the Road Rangers, with roving trucks equipped to move vehicles in simple crashes, and provide other help.
And last fall the Florida Department of Transportation and the Florida Highway Patrol signed an "Open Roads" agreement, vowing to make it a goal to clear accidents on state highways within 90 minutes.
The initiatives appear to be working, at least on Orange County freeways, where accidents are cleared 15 minutes faster, on average, than on other roads and streets.
But problems remain.
If drivers or their insurance companies don't pick a towing company, the highway patrol calls one from an official list. The highway patrol insists it has all the tow trucks it needs on call. But some operators who have tried for years to get on the list disagree.
Ken Jones of Jones Towing is one. He recalled getting called by Eatonville police to an accident blocking Kennedy Boulevard in April, but the patrol waived him off.
"That car sat there another hour before it got moved," Jones said. "What did it matter if we picked it up or not? Their rules are not effective for the traffic and congestion."
Often, too, waiting drivers watch as sheriff's deputies drive past without helping. Presha said that happens when the deputies are en route to other calls, but most likely they have alerted the patrol by radio.
But that is of little consolation to drivers who wait.
After Darcy Wood, then 16, of Orlando, got into an accident on Dr. Phillips Boulevard near Sand Lake Boulevard, shortly after noon on Dec. 20, she called her father, Jim Wood, 54, to come help. Her Dodge Neon, with a broken axle, was blocking a lane, backing up traffic. Several deputies drove past, he recalled. After 30 to 40 minutes had passed, one deputy stopped and helped push the car off the road.
Wood's appreciation was muted, though. It was two hours before the highway patrol arrived, and another hour before the crash was cleared.
"To write the report to clear the scene, that's the bogus part," Wood said. "If you're talking about an obvious fender-bender, any cop ought to be able to write that up."