It’s dusk on a humid summer evening. Your heart pounds with anticipation. This is Warm Springs, the road you’ve been warned about but can’t resist. You take it slow, rolling on despite the danger signs, your tires crunching the moist gravel. Shermans Creeks winds through the darkness to your left. Vine-shrouded trees press in on all sides. The frogs sing their hymn to oncoming night. Your brights rake the woods like spotlights.
And then the forest launches itself at you like a missile. You see glowing eyes and a flash of white. Instinct takes over. Turn the wheel! Brake. Brake!
But the animal is in the grip of its own emergency instincts. It keeps coming, a prisoner of terrified momentum, plowing into the left fender, which buckles with a sickening crunch.
The car comes to rest, idling like a winded runner. The whitetail bounds back into the woods. The radio plays on. The violent moment ebbs.
Is everyone all right?
Everyone’s fine, even the deer, from the look of it. The damage to the car seems to be cosmetic. You straighten the wheel, take a deep breath, and drive on.
This happened to the Olshans last week, a few minutes before nine, as darkness finally closed in on Warm Springs Road, but it’s a scene that plays out, with minor and major variations, over a hundred thousand times a year in Pennsylvania, and more than a million times a year nationwide: car meets deer. Sometimes the outcome is fatal, most often for the deer, but, in hundreds of cases annually, for the people in the car.
According to State Farm insurance company, which compiles deer/vehicle collision statistics, or “DVC” data, as it’s known in the industry, Pennsylvania leads the nation in the sheer number of accidents each year involving deer. Lately, the state hasn’t been in the top five “places where you’re most likely to have a DVC,” but only because its population is so large relative to the number of collisions. The top honor for “riskiest state” in 2010 belonged to West Virginia, where, believe it or not, the odds of hitting a deer over twelve months were 1 in 42.
The odds in Pennsylvania were way better – a mere 1 in 85 – but from 2009-2010, that translated into 102,165 collisions. The average cost of each collision was $3,103, which means that Pennsylvanians incurred just under $320 million dollars worth of damage from DVCs.
In other words, almost the exact amount it cost last year to fund Penn State.
Nationally, damage from DVCs last year amounted to nearly 4 billion dollars — a conservative estimate that doesn’t account for unreported collisions or claims that were refused by an insurer.
If that seems like a huge number, get ready for even larger ones in the future. The number of DVCs is on the rise. State Farm’s national 2010 statistics show a 20 percent increase in five years, which suggests massive growth in the deer population where people are driving.
This should come as no surprise, given the spread of development into woodlands and former farmland, coupled with the migration of deer from forage-depleted forests to food-rich suburbs.
A DVC on Warm Springs Road, on the other hand, is a hazard with deeper roots. For thousands of years before the arrival of the first white settler, Indians considered the game trail by Shermans Creek one of the great treasures of the natural world. Deer and other wildlife have been migrating and foraging there in great abundance since time out of mind. Warm Springs Road simply represents a widening and paving of a well established wildlife thoroughfare.
We got off lucky. We’d seen another deer nearby, so I was driving slowly. The deer wasn’t maddened by the rut, which can make a collision more violent and dangerous. Even so, the initial estimate for that glancing blow is nearly $1300, and getting the car fixed is sure to be a hassle.
There wasn’t much more I could have done to avoid the collision. After all, the deer cut across the road and hit us broadside. I was doing everything State Farm recommends: take it slow; use your brights; and keep your eyes peeled.
Oh, and don’t trust those deer whistles. There isn’t much research to back up their effectiveness, but the one thing they seem to do very well is to lull the driver into a false sense of security.
Fall is prime time for DVCs, which peak each year in November. But as we learned last week, there are dangers year-round wherever people and deer share a road.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 07 July 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
