Joplin Fire Department’s Dustin Lunow recently visited with NewsTalk KZRG, and highlighted the critical message of time management for back-to-school traffic safety, recommending that parents avoid rushing.
“The biggest thing that we preach is just time. Don’t get in a hurry. Right? There’s a lot of very young or even very brand new drivers that are on the road for the first time by themselves. You know, we have a lot of school buses on the road. We have a lot of parents dropping off and, of course, kids walking in. So, the biggest thing is don’t get in a hurry. Nothing is more important than the lives, welfare and safety of our children in the four state area.”
Lunow says that parents should plan for extra travel time to accommodate increased traffic and pedestrian activity around schools, and encourage patience to help prevent accidents caused by inattentive driving and rushing.
“The most common accidents would be just inattentive drivers, someone on the phone or something like that. You know, somebody stops abruptly for either a car moving, or somebody walked out into the roadway and now you have a rear end collision or something of that nature.
“Some of these kids that are walking to school could be walking to school for the very first time and they don’t fully understand the traffic law or the safest way for them to walk or cross the street or anything like that. So again, time, don’t get in a hurry. I would just assume a few cars will be a little bit late on the first couple of days because the first couple of days there’s a lot of extra traffic. A lot of parents want to drop them off for the first day of school.”
He encourages parents to practice driving routes with new teen drivers to enhance comfort and awareness before independent driving begins.
“It’s just repetition…repetition and a lot of prayer. Get out there and make the trip a couple of times with your kids so they feel comfortable about the route, what to look for and things of that nature before they have to do it by themselves. That’s one of the biggest things.
“One of the other things I wanted to touch on is that people often wonder what happens when maybe Joplin fire or Joplin police or an ambulance is responding and we have a lot of traffic on the roadways or even responding into a school zone.
“And I wanted to make sure everybody is aware that emergency services takes schools own safety, the safety of our children at a premium. We do not, even though we have lights and sirens and all the fun stuff that we have on our big trucks, we do the speed limit in a school zone. The school zone is 25. We’re doing 25 miles an hour.
“If a school bus stops in front of one of our trucks and we’re responding, we stop. We do not go around a stopped school bus until we are sure that they have the arms in and all the children are accounted for. That’s something that we take very, very seriously. And we ask that you do the same.
“Some of the school zones can kind of pop up on you. We haven’t been used to them. They haven’t been turned on in a while. But they are definitely there for the safety of our children. So please, please, please be conscious of where you’re at and be very observant of all the little moving people this next week in the four state area.”
