Heat Exhaustion and North Carolina Auto Accidents: A Fiery Combination
As summer heats up, expect to read about more North Carolina auto accidents, especially over the 4th of July holiday.
It’s a tragedy, but it’s a classic pattern – on national holidays like Independence Day, more people in North Carolina and elsewhere “party.” That means there are more intoxicated drivers out on the roads… and thus more scary DUI car accidents in Charlotte and elsewhere. If you or a loved one was hurt in one of those accidents, you can get immediate and powerful legal help by connecting with the team at the law offices of Michael DeMayo for a case evaluation.
Of course, in an ideal world, we want to do more than just react to car accidents: we want to understand how to prevent them.
To that end, let’s talk about heat. Specifically: How might the dog days of summer impact the behaviors and reaction times of drivers?
Some statistics suggest that hot weather makes people worse drivers. But these studies, by and large, are difficult to use as guides, since they rarely effectively tease out correlation from causation. In other words, say you find a study that determines that, on super hot days, more accidents occur. Why might that be? Assuming the statistics are decent, why might that relationship occur?
The kneejerk answer is to “blame” the hot weather – to tell yourself a story like “on really hot days, drivers get overheated and thus become more likely to get distracted behind the wheel or fall asleep.”
But we need to be careful about leaping to such conclusions!
For instance, maybe the period over which the study was conducted fell on a national holiday, like Labor Day. And maybe over the Labor Day, accident rates spiked. And maybe this spike in accidents was solely responsible for the overall spike in the number of accidents during the period of hot days assessed. And maybe the reason why more accidents happened over the Labor Day was simply that more people “partied” on Labor Day.
Thus, the hot weather had nothing to do with it!
It’s important to surface potential methodological flaws like this, since if you don’t understand “what causes what,” you can make inaccurate conclusions about how to prevent accidents or even how to determine the causes of an accident.
Two different ways of framing your problem can lead you to two radically different types of investigations.
