Saturday, March 03, 2007

Legacy of Suicide

I was in City Hall yesterday to get a permit for street storage of a dumpster, as I will shortly begin a project in my downtown building.

Racine has a unique law concerning those dumpsters. The dumpsters must have a certain kind of reflective material on them. Additionally, permit holders like me must surround the dumpster with orange construction cones also adorned with reflective material.

A few years ago, two people died in separate incidents as their vehicles smashed into dumsters at very high speeds. The whispers around town were that these were suicides, but the political pressure to "do something" about the dumpsters was undoubtedly intense.

So now we have a mildly annoying law. But we can say that we have done something about the dangers of dark dumpsters. And we can remain comfortably in denial about the problem of suicide.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

denis how ridiculous...

if there are rumors that the people who crashed into the dumpsters were committing suicide doesn't make it true. what if it was just an accident because the dumpsters were not marked? it is a fact that people crash into a variety of things that aren't marked. just look at what happened the other day with the bus transporting the college kids. that ramp was marked but not good enough apparently...so to say the city has rules on marking dumpsters in the street to avoid the issue of suicide is really, really, ridiculous.

Denis Navratil said...

My post might be ridiculous. Either that or the law is. It would be hard to answer that definitively, as neither of us can discern what was going on in the head of the youth as he hit the dumpster while travelling at a very high rate of speed.

Anonymous said...

if he was trying to commit suicide he could have driven into a number of different objects. you can't with say with certainty he wasn't driving at a high rate of speed and mistakenly drove his car into the dumpster not seeing it in the dark. young people do drive recklessly often and sometimes they lose their lives in the process. maybe we should look into how old someone must be before getting a DL. how old was this youth?

Denis Navratil said...

Anon, perhaps I made a mistake in bringing this up. There are facts out there that lead most reasonable people to conclude that these dumpster/car collisions were likely suicides. I can't prove it and neither can anyone else. Let me leave it like this; if they were suicides, then reflective material on dumpsters is only a feel good response.

Anonymous said...

This was a few years ago on main street. The dumster was diffciult to see afetr dark. I remember my wife having to sweerve to avoid it t a few days before the accident. Your allegations are wrong, and only hurtful to the families of the victims. Just suck it up and buy some darn traffic cones. They cant be mroe than 20 buck or so.

Anonymous said...

yeah...i agree with anon 2. to make that leap to suicide just so you can whine about having to pay for cones is really selfish. you should be more responsible.