GAINESVILLE - The H.E.A.T. is on in Hall Couny in more ways than one - and three brand new patrol cars are now on the road to head off highway tragedies.
Hall County Sheriff's Deputy Chris Dale is behind the wheel in one of those cars, on patrol now for about two weeks - and AccessNorthGa.com went along for a ride Friday.
The arrival of the cars was announced a few weeks ago by the sheriff's office. (See link below to earlier story).
H.E.A.T. stands for Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic.
Maj. Jeff Strickland said two weeks ago in announcing ther arrival of the cars, that the three officers who will man them will be specifically watching for speeders and impaired or aggressive drivers in the county.
The Hall County Sheriff's Office H.E.A.T. team will coordinate with the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety's year-round waves of high visibility concentrated patrols, multi-jurisdictional road checks, and sobriety checkpoints. H.E.A.T. is formed out of 27 different jurisdictional agencies across the state, and funded by the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety.
Dale said Friday it is his mission is to reduce traffic deaths and injuries. Dale said he looks for speeders and drivers under the influence. Dale led the Sheriff's Office in DUI arrests last year and leads this year so far.
"The primary goal in every H.E.A.T. unit across the state is to reduce the fatalities and reduce serious injury crashes," Dale said Friday as he cruised the roads and highways of Hall County.
Dale said a lot of serious accidents would not happen if drivers would not speed.
"The severity of the accidents that's I've seen could have been reduced by a reduction in speed," he said as he steered his distinctive dark blue patrol car through the busy lunchtime traffic Friday - the letters H.E.A.T. emblazoned on the sides.
At one point, he stopped his patrol car to check cars passing him with his laser unit, an accurate measure, he says, of how fast the cars are moving.
Speeding causes a lot of accidents, but so does not paying attention behind the wheel.
"If you are not paying attention to your driving, you're not paying attention to your speed," Dale said. "Speeders I've checked with laser or radar are on a cell phone or looking down or putting make-up on, or something else to keep their attention from driving."
The H.E.A.T. interceptor cars have a different look: they are navy blue and are distinctively different from our other tan colored Sheriff's cars. They are fully marked just as all other Governor's Office of Highway Safety H.E.A.T. cars are, across Georgia and they are equipped with state of the art lighting and sirens, speed detection devices, as well as video recorders.
With Labor Day coming up next weekend, Dale hopes the cruisers will serve as a reminder that the new interceptors are on patrol.
He said the H.E.A.T. deputies are specifically assigned to working traffic and reducing accidents.
"We focus on unsafe acts," Dale said and that includes aggressive driving, things that could lead to road rage. "Riding people's bumpers, cutting people off, improper lane changes, anything could harass or intimidate another driver, that's considered aggressive driving."
Dale and the other H.E.A.T. officers concentrate on areas where injuries and fatalities have occurred recently in Hall County. Back at the patrol office in Gainesville, a large county map has concentrations of red dots... those dots indicate the problem areas.
"We have a lot of red dots and it never stops," he said.
Wednesday
October 16th, 2024
11:22PM
