St. Lucie County’s five deadliest roads saw 324 fatal accidents 1994-2008\

Stuart News: St. Lucie County’s deadliest highway, Interstate 95, accounted for more than 92 deaths from 1994 to 2008.

That’s 15 percent of the county’s 607 traffic fatalities during that time.

An average of 40 people — infants to senior citizens — died annually on the county’s highways, victims of everything from blown tires to accidents caused by distractions, according to a Scripps Howard News Service review of accident records.

In St. Lucie County, the deaths are mainly on the heaviest-traveled highways. I-95 — which has about 40,000 vehicles a day — is followed by Florida’s Turnpike, U.S. 1 and State Road 70.

Fifth on the list is County Road 68, which had 17 deaths, or about one a year. The county’s five deadliest highways account for 324, or 53 percent, of the deaths in 524 separate traffic accidents in a 15-year period ending in 2008.

“If you add more cars you are going to have more accidents,” said Sgt. Kurt Mittwede, traffic unit supervisor with the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office.

That was particularly true during the real estate boom in the last decade when traffic clogged highways that hadn’t been improved to handle more vehicles, he said.

Investigators said the fatalities typically are scattered along different parts of the roads and caused by individual circumstances.

In general, “The more volume and the more speed, the more deaths you see,” Mittwede said. Also in general, the fatalities are caused by human error.

“The roads don’t appear to be the cause,” Port St. Lucie Police Department spokesman Tom Nichols said.

If roads are at fault in accidents, it usually is because of debris on the road or a car skidding on rain water from a backed-up drain, highway officials said.

More than 90 percent of accidents are the fault of people, said Richard Mitinger, a Florida Department of Transportation traffic operations engineer in highway safety.

Still, FDOT monitors accidents to see if the roads need to be updated.

“We are always reviewing records, trying to see what we can do,” Mitinger said.

He said the agency has been widening I-95 on the Treasure Coast, as well as improving U.S. 1 to keep up with increasing traffic.

By summer, FDOT officials expect to turn on overhead message boards to alert I-95 motorists of problems ahead. Also, roadside cameras will begin relaying live images of the interstate highway to a central monitoring center in Fort Pierce. That will allow FDOT officials to see live traffic conditions. The observers will be able to see traffic problems, so they can deal with conditions that could lead to accidents.

FDOT might have to delay for a year sending out roving road rangers to help motorists on the highway. That is because of legal challenges by one of the companies that is bidding on the work. Road rangers will help get stranded vehicles out of the way and clear up crashes.

Road improvements can have an impact.

Following the installation of median guardrails on Florida’s Turnpike in St. Lucie and Indian River counties in 2005, traffic accidents and fatalities there have dropped 60 percent, said Sgt. Jorge Delahoz, spokesman for the Florida Highway Patrol.

Now, protective cables are being installed to help keep motorist from going into roadside canals in Indian River and St. Lucie counties, he said.

Until the state made improvements in the middle of the last decade, St. Lucie County’s equivalent of a “dead’s man curve” was a remote western section of the county’s road to Okeechobee, S.R. 70, Mittwede said. The road has been widened to four lanes for seven miles west of I-95 and safety markers were installed.

“The road was outdated,” he said. “People would pass on an inside curve and end up in head-on” accidents.

The eastern end of S.R. 70 is Virginia Avenue, which has been widened to six lanes to handle urban traffic.

In southern St. Lucie County, U.S. 1 has been widened to six lanes to handle increasingly heavy traffic and to make the road safer, officials said. The state also added medians along U.S. 1 to limit left turns that were contributing to accidents.

Still, U.S. 1 from Virginia Avenue to Edwards Road in Fort Pierce is a commercial area with many places where motorists turn in and out of parking lots.

“That area makes me nervous,” Mittwede said.

These types of improvements, coupled with the economy, higher gas prices and traffic enforcement have resulted in fewer highway fatalities in the nation and in Florida, government reports show.

The county’s death rate, in 2008, was 1.03 for every 100 million miles traveled compared to a 1.50 statewide average. The mid-sized county ranked 23 in fatal accidents of the state’s 67 counties.

Still, in 2009, 24 people died on St. Lucie County roads. Of those, 18 were on the county’s deadliest roads.

And the impact those accidents have extends beyond statistics.

On a clear sunny day in 2008, Miami motorist Dominique Brice wove in and out of traffic on a straight section of I-95, speeding northward in excess of 80 mph, excited about moving to a new home in Georgia. Suddenly, her vehicle swerved out of control, slamming into two motorcyclists parked along the road.

North Miami police officer Fritz Doucet, 37, and West Palm Beach computer technician Raul Ortiz were killed instantly at the juncture of St. Lucie and Indian River counties.

“I cry and I cry and I cry,” Brice said in pleading leniency before an Indian River Circuit Court judge in 2009 sentenced her to 18 1/2 years in prison for vehicular homicide.

Doucet is survived by a son, Manny, 5, who Doucet’s girlfriend said isn’t old enough to understand the truth. So she said, “(Doucet) had to go to heaven,” said Abigail Mena, of Broward County. “I told him God needed him.”

Despite the personal tragedies, law enforcement officers said St. Lucie County has made significant improvements combatting traffic fatalities. That includes specialized patrols for drunken driving.

“I would say we are doing really well,” Mittwede said. “If we didn’t have I-95 and the Florida Turnpike, traffic fatalities would be really low.”