It may be true that some things in life are unavoidable. The old saw goes that “Only two things in life are certain: death and taxes.” (Those familiar with where to get a good cocktail in midtown Reno will know of the upscale bar by the same name, Death & Taxes.) And if one takes the view that living is one extended exercise in risk management, one is likely to adopt a certain degree of fatalism about risk. That attitude that it is all out of our hands can apply equally to risks of injury car accidents. If you have already been involved in a car accident that left you dealing with injuries contact the auto accident attorneys at Benson & Bingham to discuss your recovery options.
Opportunities abound for us to be hurt or killed. Airplanes generally do not crash, but that outcome is possible. On the other hand, most people drive from home to work and to all the day’s errands without incident, but someone, somewhere in the country is suffering from an injury car accident. Even in the workaday activities of preparing hot coffee for breakfast, pushing paper a desk job, and chopping vegetables for dinner, there is potential for us to be hurt through our own carelessness, that of others, or the poor design of products we use.
A recent string of Carson injury car accidents reminds us of the risks of simply traveling from A to B. Three injury car accidents took place within a week in this small Nevada city:
- Afternoon of Friday, January 10: several callers reported a crash at the intersection of Long and Roop Streets [1]
- Afternoon of Friday, January 17: one driver reported injured in a two-car injury car accident at the intersection of Koontz Lane and South Edmonds Drive [2]
- Morning of Saturday, January 18: multiple injuries reported in a three-car injury car accident at the intersection of Long and Carson Streets [3]
Nevada is ranked on of the worst driving states in the nation.
Putting the Carson Injury Car Crashes in Context
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, a federal agency that studies contagious disease and other causes of morbidity and educates the public about the same), some 2.5 million people went to an emergency room due to an injury car accident. [4] The data are from 2012, which limits their usefulness and also points to the murkiness of the underlying figures. It is a resource-intensive pursuit for federal agencies to collect comprehensive data, on a nationwide scale, about injury car accidents and their effects on the driving public. That is one reason why the CDC continues to rely on data that is now approaching its second decade of use. Also, consider what the metric is: visits to emergency rooms. This data set tell us nothing about people who declined ambulance transport or who did not take themselves directly to the emergency room; it may not even include people who sought treatment at an urgent care facility that may have been covered by their insurance plan at a lower cost. And a number of people hurt in injury car accidents may have declined all formal medical intervention for personal, financial, or philosophical reasons and instead addressed their injuries at home.
So, we are admittedly working with an old and potentially unreliable – or at least under-representative – data set. But we can still extrapolate from this data to place the recent string of Carson injury car accidents in a national context.
There are approximately 330 million people in the United States. [5] Just over 3 million people live in the state of Nevada, or 0.9 percent of the national population. The county of Carson City – for those who do not know, Carson City is both the capital city of the State of Nevada and one of the state’s 17 counties including nearby Washoe and Douglas, [7] making it what is known as an “independent city” [8] – has a population of 55,000.
Carson City’s 55,000 residents make up about 2 percent of the population of the state of Nevada and .0017 percent of the national population. If we take the number of 2.5 million annual injuries from car accident nationally each year, we should expect a proportional number of 417 injuries from Carson automobile crashes to occur each year. On average that is about 1.14 car accident injuries per day.
The recent string of Carson injury car accidents generally fits with these general projections. The local, anecdotal data from news reports measured three injury car accidents over an eight-day period that resulted in three reported injuries from the car crashes. That would be an average of only 0.38 car accident injuries per day, but that is not all to the story. Recall that one of those incidents was merely a report of a car accident snarling traffic, with no reports about the injury status of the people involved. Additionally, this sample relies only on the incidents that made it into certain reports easily available to the general public; many more accidents could have occurred in this eight-day period that were properly reported to authorities, but that does not mean that local media knew about (or chose to report on) those incidents.
When the numbers are this small, a minor irregularity about what is reported or how something is characterized can throw off a numerical analysis. The takeaway for observers of injury car accidents should be that even in small Nevada communities like Carson City, a typical day involves at least one car crash resulting in personal injuries. We must all remain vigilant drivers and pedestrians if we are to keep our communities safe, and if tragedy does strike, we should know to turn to an experienced personal injury lawyer for legal advice. for more information about car accidents and what to do after you are involved one Benson & Bingham can answer any questions you may have. Contact Benson & Bingham today.
[1] https://carsonnow.org/story/01/10/2020/injury-accident-reported-near-long-and-roop-streets
[2] https://carsonnow.org/story/01/17/2020/injury-accident-reported-koontz-and-s-edmonds
[3] https://carsonnow.org/story/01/18/2020/injury-accident-reported-long-and-carson-street
[4] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/crash-injuries/index.html
[5] https://www.census.gov/popclock
[6] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/NV
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_Nevada