‘Drinksgiving’: The night before Thanksgiving is a huge night for drunken driving
When it comes to drinking and driving, the night before Thanksgiving has become even more deadly than New Year’s Eve.
So, as the heaviest drinking season of the year begins, federal safety officials and law enforcement across the country have launched a social media blitz to prevent more alcohol-related deaths.
The evening has become known as Blackout Wednesday, or Drinksgiving, a night of partying that kicks off the alcohol-infused stretch between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration counted more alcohol-related driving deaths on Thanksgiving eve than on New Year’s Eve in four of the past five years.
From 2013 to 2017, more than 800 people in the United States died in DUI crashes over the Thanksgiving holiday — from Wednesday night to early Monday morning, the agency says.
Thanksgiving eve has turned into a big drinking night as bars and restaurants across the country offer Blackout Wednesday drinks and special events. A few spots around Kansas City are partaking, but the night has become problematic for police and safety officials everywhere.
Law enforcement officials across the country are gearing up. Police in Kansas City and Overland Park will be saturating parts of their cities known for DUIs with extra patrols on Wednesday.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went on the offensive with a #BoycottBlackoutWednesday campaign on social media to remind Americans that “buzzed driving is drunk driving.”
“A popular trend, Thanksgiving Eve, or ‘Blackout Wednesday,’ highlights — and even encourages — the heavy consumption of alcohol throughout the long holiday weekend,” the department said in a statement. “It’s important to remember that drunk driving is dangerous and illegal in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC.”
Law enforcement agencies are flooding Twitter with safe-driving messages.
Eager partiers are on Twitter, too. But they’re making plans.
“Tomorrow … Blackout Wednesday … Be ready for something new and (something) wild. The boys are back in town,” Twitter user Brendan Stanfield, a former college baseball player in Illinois, tweeted this week.
Drinksgiving, the movie
Drinksgiving “has likely been around for decades, but it didn’t get much recognition until around 2007, when the catchy term was coined,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in 2017.
A movie called “Drinksgiving” came out in 2016 about a post-grad named Sarah having her first “grown-up” party on the night before Thanksgiving. But that’s not what the holiday is really about, one critic complained on the movie’s IMDB page, writing that “Drinksgiving” is really about college kids with nothing to do the night before the feast catching up with their friends.
“The only thing better than Thanksgiving dinner is the pre-party before Thanksgiving!” is how Bar Louie in the Power and Light District enticed customers on Facebook.
The bar got a jump start on the holiday by hosting its Drinksgiving party on Sunday with specials on Jameson shots. It was a first for the bar.
The Sandbox on Barry Road north of the river is throwing a beer pong tournament and serving caramel apple cider cocktails and apple cider sangria for its first Drinksgiving event on Wednesday.
It’s bringing out the board games and dominoes, too, “just to feed that nostalgia of being back home,” said general manager Bryan Green.
He’s in his first year of managing the Sandbox, which is known for its pickleball courts. “We were looking for events to let people know we’re open through winter,” Green said, and college kids on his staff knew about Drinksgiving.
“I don’t think it’s something that’s blown up yet” in Kansas City, he said. “But it is a time to go out. I think the biggest crowd we expect are a lot of college kids coming back home.”
Deadly consequences
More than one out of every three traffic fatalities during Thanksgiving 2017 involved an alcohol-impaired driver.
It happened here.
Shortly after midnight on Thanksgiving in 2017, a man driving the wrong way on Interstate 29 in Platte County killed Nelson Guzman-Cuellar and Normalina Erazo Chaconde-Perez of Kansas City, Kansas. They died at the scene.
The driver, Deone E. Starr, now 32, told Kansas City police that he had been drinking vodka during a Thanksgiving gathering at a friend’s house earlier that evening. He was sentenced in June to 10 years in prison after earlier pleading guilty to driving while intoxicated.
Chaconde-Perez was three months pregnant, according to a GoFundMe page that raised money for the funerals.
“We see a lot of accidents that are alcohol-related around this time of year, from Thanksgiving to the first of January,” said officer John Lacy of the Overland Park Police Department.
“A lot of kids come home from college, and you also have the holiday parties. At the same time people are going over to family members’ homes and they’re consuming alcohol.
“That’s why we push the message out to the public, saying that you need to be responsible when you’re consuming alcohol. Don’t drink and drive. Have a designated driver. That’s when we pound those types of messages on our social media.”
In Kansas City on Wednesday, police “will be operating what they call a ‘wolf pack,’ where they saturate areas of the city where incidences of drunk driving are high,” said Sgt. Jacob Becchina, a Kansas City police spokesman. “They did this last year as well.”
Like KCPD, Overland Park police will be sending extra patrols into accident-prone areas. They joined other departments across Kansas in a “Thanksgiving Safe Arrival” traffic enforcement campaign in effect through Sunday.
A Kansas Department of Transportation grant will underwrite overtime efforts to get impaired drivers off the roads and to issue tickets for drivers and passengers not wearing seat belts.
Lacy said Overland Park hasn’t noted any higher incidences of DUIs on Thanksgiving Wednesday.
During the holidays, Friday and Saturday nights are the worst, “when you take into consideration people going to and from Chiefs games, kids coming home, parties, football, you’ll see an increase of people driving under the influence,” he said. “We just want people to be aware that people are consuming alcohol at a higher rate.”
Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s longest running public awareness campaign, Tie One On for Safety, encourages people to display a red ribbon on their vehicle to remind people to use a designated driver.
“This is the time of year when we experience the most fatalities from drunk driving,” said Chris Morrison, program manger for MADD’s Heartland chapter in Kansas City.
MADD encourages people to have a plan to get home safely. People know not to get behind the wheel when inebriated, he said, but sometimes they forget not to get into a car being driven by someone who’s been drinking.
“By the time you’re out celebrating with your family or friends, or whoever that might be, those inhibitions become lower the minute you get impaired and your decision-making skills aren’t the best,” Morrison said. “That’s why we ask you to plan ahead.”
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