TULSA, Okla. — More security enhancements are on the way in which for a number of the state’s most harmful interchanges aimed toward stopping wrong-way drivers and the tragic penalties they depart behind.
A number of months in the past, the 2 News Oklahoma Problem Solvers showed you the four locations of a pilot program that included sophisticated wrong-way driving detection systems along I-40 between Oklahoma City and the Arkansas state line.
Now, that program is increasing.
While the rising pilot program is simply too late for one Oklahoma household, they’re hoping to stop tragedy from placing different households.
The journey alongside I-40 close to Henryetta, previous a just lately put in wrong-way driver detection system, brings a flood of feelings for Jeff and Kristy Murrow.
“Life changed in a moment. It’s definitely the worst day of your life,” Jeff says.
It hurts their coronary heart to suppose, and to surprise, how dramatically completely different their lives can be now if there had been such a system alongside a stretch of freeway in the Oklahoma City space a few years in the past, the place Marissa, their 19-year-old daughter was tragically killed by a drunk, wrong-way driver.
It was slightly previous midnight when a trooper knocked on their entrance door.
Kristy asks, “Where would she be today, you know? She’d be in her senior year of college now, preparing for her life, all the hopes and dreams that she had.”
Dreams all dashed, in the blink of a watch, by that drunk, wrong-way driver.
Just like the five hundred or so victims who die throughout the nation yearly in wrong-way driving tragedies, in accordance with AAA.
Now, Jeff and Kristy, make Marrisa’s life and loss of life, their mission.
“I want to make Marissa’s life count for something. She made sure her life counted and impacted so many people with her life. And this is a way to take it and say, what can we do, to make sure this doesn’t keep happening,” Jeff tells us.
Every day, each week, each month, the Murrows dedicate themselves to coach, advocate, and foyer for adjustments to place the brakes on drunk and wrong-way driving.
It’s what Marissa, they are saying, would need them to do.
“We learned so much from her. Normally, parents try to teach their children, but Marissa put other people first. Her favorite scripture was let everything you do, be cone in love. And that’s the way she lived her life.”
And the Murrows are inspired to listen to that the 4 wrong-way driving detection systems alongside I-40 in Eastern Oklahoma are only the start. ODOT just lately awarded contacts to have the identical system put in at one other 14 key interchanges throughout the state.
“The severity of these crashes is almost always fatal,” ODOT spokesperson Lisa Salim says;
The very purpose, she says, why stopping wrong-way driving has rapidly risen up the ranks of important, obligatory security enhancements.
“We send our heartfelt condolences to any family that has suffered a tragedy like this,” Salim says.
The wrong-way driving detection system includes bright, blinking, LED warning lights. Radar and thermal sensors trigger them when a driver enters a wrong-way zone.
Designers say it’s especially effective, for catching the attention of drunk drivers. The system includes an alert activation zone, a self-correction zone, and a confirmation zone.
If a wrong-way driver doesn’t turn around, the expanded system sends out an alert automatically, to nearby law enforcement and to message signs, warning other drivers.
“That’s what you want, that would have saved her,” Kristy says.
Saved their daughter, the Murrows imagine. Now, although, they pray, and so they’re hopeful, it would save others.
“This is just something you never want another father, another mother to ever get a call, get a knock on the door.”
A knock, that adjustments lives, endlessly.
“Yeah, there’s pain, it’s agonizing when I see a picture, or I see a video of her singing, just the joy she radiated, there’s a lot of pain with that, but there’s more pain to feel like she’s forgotten,” Jeff instructed us.
But Marrisa might by no means be forgotten. Not by her household, not by her associates, who celebrated Marissa’s 21st birthday, at her grave.
Yes, as painful, as hurtful, as heart-wrenching it may be, the Murrows transfer on, gazing forward, to much more lifesaving adjustments on the horizon.
“It reminds me, somebody else’s daughter is going to make it home.”
Changes may help fill life’s journey with pleasure, not heartbreak.
The 14 new wrong-way driver detection systems will quickly be put in at key interchanges alongside 1-40 between Oklahoma City and the Texas state line… and alongside I-35 between Oklahoma County and the Kansas state line.
The eight-million-dollar price of the pilot applications is roofed by a federal grant.
Some of that cash may also be used to make security enhancements at greater than 70 different interchanges, which embrace new conventional wrong-way indicators, up to date striping on ramps, and raised pavement markers that present crimson if a driver is touring the incorrect manner.
Eventually, ODOT hopes to link all these self-contained wrong-way detection systems to that expanded system which can enable them to show warnings to different drivers on message indicators.
Contact the Problem Solvers:
- 918-748-1502
- [email protected]
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