Police warning: number of alcoholics has risen sharply
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The number of traffic accidents involving alcohol is increasing again. The Salzburg police warn of this. Last weekend alone, officials had to record six accidents, some of which involved heavily intoxicated drivers. In general, the number of alcoholics has risen sharply, according to the police.
One of the most serious accidents occurred on Sunday night – a heavily intoxicated 19-year-old drove his car down a 52-year-old and seriously injured him. The police reported five other accidents with alcohol drivers last weekend. The average value of the alcohol tests is 1.7 per mille, says Friedrich Schmidhuber, head of the state traffic department.
“The lowest value was 1.2 and the highest was 2.18 per mil. It is also a dramatic development that we are following here, that this high level of alcohol consumption is reflected relatively strongly in accidents,” says Schmidhuber.
Increase of up to 80 percent
The phenomenon is not new – statistically speaking, most alcohol-related accidents are registered in July and August. In the first half of the year, however, the police already noticed a significant increase in the number of alcoholics, says Schmidhuber: “In cases where the blood alcohol level was between 0.5 and 0.8 per mille, we had an increase of 80 percent. The increase from 570 to 783 cases was among the more heavily intoxicated, i.e. over 0.8 per mille.”
The fact that more drunk drivers were caught may also be due to the increased police controls. They have risen from 44,000 in the first half of 2021 to 72,000 this year.