A lesson in safety
cut: Members of the Moses Lake police and fire departments participate on a mock car crash scene outside Moses Lake High School. Putting a myriad of tools and skills to work, the different crews enacted their arrival to the site, the removal of students from wrecked cars, as well as the attention given to injured people. The MLHS' chapter of the Students Against Destructive Decision put together the car crash scene to raise awareness of the dangers of reckless and drunken driving.
Mock car crash highlights dangers of unsafe driving for high school students
There was no real car crash at Moses Lake High School Monday morning. Still a group of students is hoping that there was an impact.
The Students Against Destructive Decisions group at MLHS put together a mock car crash scene outside the school building to help other students realize the dangers of reckless driving.
The scene, complete with empty beer cans, wrecked cars, and injured students, grabbed the attention of the student body, who watched live or from their classrooms as Moses Lake Police and Moses Lake Fire crews worked at the site, extracting people from the cars and tending to the injured.
"It was really sad," said Brittney Watson, one of the students watching the crash scene from the bleachers surrounding the site. Student Ana Vega, described the scenario as "weird."
"I don't want that to happen to me," she added.
Chelsea Steele, another student. said that watching the crash scene had been scary and sad, and said that seeing the consequences first hand had "changed my way of thinking a lot."
Such is the kind of impact the students from SADD and the adults from the MLPD, MLFD and WSP were hoping to make on the youngsters watching from afar. Whether that impact was made is anybody's guess when it comes to teen-agers, said MLPD chief Fred Haynes.
"You want to hope that they take it seriously," he said. "Sometimes it's hard to read a teen-ager's response to things. Hopefully it made an impression on them."
The students from SADD, with the makeup simulating wounds still on their faces said that the purpose of this was to raise awareness of the dangers of drunken driving to a level that is mostly nonexistent among young people today.
"High school students don't know about (these dangers)" said Alix Sieg, the president of SADD, remarking that most of Monday's crowd had taken the enactment seriously.
"This is not something to joke about," she added.
After the crash scene, students walked to a school gym, where a mock funeral took place for one of the victims of the crash.
Jeff Turner, chaplain coordinator for the MLPD, conducted the funeral and told the students that the choices they make affect more than just themselves when they are in an accident.
"They affect the people who tell your mom and dad about it," he said. "They affect the police and fire crews, who see these things day after day, and they affect the community, seeing these things happen year after year."