With tomorrow being Labor Day, the Iowa State Patrol cautions people to drive responsibly as they’re reporting less traffic-related deaths than years past.
According to Sergeant Alex Dinkla, Labor Day is widely known as the ending to the “100 Deadliest Days of Summer,” which begins around Memorial Day and is typically a time where there is a significant increase in traffic casualties and injuries, particularly involving teen drivers. He says that their department identifies the amount of people who die in vehicle crashes, and so far in 2025 that number has decreased by 27, resulting in 182 total deaths. Dinkla stresses that the state patrol will be cracking down on impaired driving, as they are collaborating with the Governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau for the campaign of “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over.”
“It’s a high visibility enforcement project. We’ve got many officers that are out there looking at the streets and trying to find those impaired drivers. Last year, 45 people died on Iowa roadways (over the final four weeks of the summer), and nearly 30 percent of those fatalities were caused by impaired drivers. And so we are going to make sure that we do not let those impaired drivers infiltrate our roadways because we want to make sure that people are allowed to get where they need to go safely and get there responsibly.”…