‘Every 15 Minutes’ event to be held at BHS next week

Every 15 minutes, someone in the United States is killed in an alcohol-related traffic accident.

While that’s a dire statistic, it’s just numbers and words to many people, especially young drivers — until the victim is a friend or family member.

Then it’s a personal tragedy.

“Life’s lessons are best learned through experience,” Benicia police Lt. Frank Hartig said.

“Unfortunately, when the target audience is teens and the topic is drinking and driving, experience is not the teacher of choice.”

The alternative is “Every 15 Minutes,” a two-day program that offers those real-life experiences “without the real-life risks,” Hartig said.

Beginning Tuesday and continuing Wednesday, Benicia High School students will get a taste of what victims and survivors experience when they’re part of one of those fatal crashes.

But unlike those victims, they’ll get to live to describe the experiences, because they’ll be participants in a program designed to impress upon teenagers the dangers of driving under the influence of alcohol or other controlled substances.

Benicia High periodically has been the site of the two-day program, which takes a coordinated effort of staff and volunteers of Benicia Police Department, Benicia High, Benicia Fire Department, Benicia Parks and Community Services Department, California Highway Patrol, Sutter-Solano Hospital, Kaiser Medical Center, the school’s Parent-Teacher Association and local businesses and service clubs, Hartig said.

“A major part of the ‘Every 15 Minutes’ program is a simulation of an alcohol-related accident scene,” Hartig said. Though it may be a fictional portrayal, he called the event “emotionally charged.”

Benicia High’s accident scene will be on display at 10:57 a.m. Tuesday on the campus’s upper back parking lot. But preparation for the event will start much earlier, with volunteers checking in at the high school’s office at 7:15 a.m. so they can be briefed.

Certain students will start being pulled from both Benicia High and Liberty High School beginning at 8 a.m. Some will get makeup applied that simulates the injuries they would have received in a serious vehicle accident, and some will be assigned the roles of those who died in the crash.

For the purposes of the “Every 15 Minutes” demonstration, those students are called “the living dead,” Hartig said.

Back in class, other students will hear a 9-1-1 call broadcast on the school’s public address system. Then they’ll hear the response by Benicia Police and Fire departments, CHP and other emergency services, using a variety of vehicles that will include a medical evacuation helicopter.

To remove some of the victims of the crash, emergency responders will use an extraction tool that can chew through a mangled vehicle. Rescue workers will treat the simulated injuries, and a volunteer coroner will deal with the simulated fatalities, Hartig said.

And the person identified as the impaired driver will go through an arrest and booking.

“These students will experience first-hand the sensations of being involved in a tragic, alcohol-related collision,” Hartig said.

Periodically throughout the day, even more students will be pulled from class to join the “dead,” Hartig said. Each time, a police officer will enter the classroom and read an obituary written by the parents of the student who then will be considered deceased.

The obituaries will describe the circumstances of the student’s “death” and the contributions the student made to the school and the community.

In the cases of those made up to appear as victims, and in the case of those removed from class during the school day, the students’ parents will receive “death notifications,” given by uniformed police officers to their home or place of work, to add to the realism of the impact of impaired driving, Hartig said.

The students pulled from class don’t return. Instead, they’re made up to look dead, will wear a coroner’s tag and a black “Every 15 Minutes” T-shirt at the staged collision display.

Participating students also will visit Solano County’s morgue, a hospital emergency room and the Benicia Police Department’s cells.

To represent the separation from friends and family, participating students have a retreat at 4 p.m. Tuesday, and their parents’ retreat will start at 7 that night.

“During the most powerful program of the retreat, the students will be taken through an audio-visualization of their own death,” Hartig said.

“Then each student will write a letter to his or her parents, starting out with ‘Dear Mom and Dad, Every fifteen minutes someone in the United States dies from an alcohol-related traffic collision, and today I died.’” The student writes about things “‘I never had the chance to tell you,’” Hartig said.

During their retreat, parents get a chance to write similar letters to their children.

At their respective retreats, both students and parents will be met with support staff of counselors, trained volunteers and police officers, Hartig said.

The lessons continue, he said.

Students get to wear goggles that resemble the vision of an impaired driver, and they’ll participate in other exercises and games.

The impact of the event will continue Wednesday during a series of assemblies, during which normal school activities will be shown, then students will see images of the first students taken from class as well as the staged accident.

Project coordinators will guide the assemblies’ audiences through the effects of losing a loved one through a bad choice, Hartig said. Among the speakers will be some of the student participants, who will read their letters to their parents; police officers; and hospital employees who will describe their own emotional trauma from dealing with children who are killed in such accidents.

Parents also will speak about how they were affected by the program. “We will also have a powerful speaker who actually lost a child to a drunk driver,” Hartig said.

He said the two-day program will challenge young drivers “to think about drinking, using drugs, personal safety and the responsibility of making mature decisions when lives are involved.

“The focus of the assembly stresses that the decision to consume alcohol and drugs can affect many more people than just the one who is drug-impaired and drives,” Hartig said.

“This very emotional and heart-wrenching event will illustrate to students the potentially dangerous consequences of their use of alcohol, regardless of how casual they believe their use may be.”