Focusing on dunes safety By JONATHAN DALE, Staff Writer; Dateline: Glamis
Sunday, November 26, 2006 2:25 AM PST
KEVIN MARTY PHOTO
A Bureau of Land Management ranger directs off-road traffic in the dunes near Glamis on Saturday.
Paul Nagel has firsthand experience of the potential insanity of the five-day Thanksgiving weekend in the Imperial Sand Dunes near here.
“Anytime you get 100,000 or 200,000 people together, things get crazy,” Nagel said Saturday afternoon.
But while admitting to the frequent occurrence of off-highway vehicle accidents during the past 30 years he has come to the dunes, the Alta Loma man believes the popular weekend event is slowly becoming more positive, thanks in large part to a renewed effort by local, state and federal agencies.
“Over the last five years we’ve had a significant effort by the local officials and the (Bureau of Land Management) to get rid of the guys who are out here causing trouble and to make it more for families,” Nagel said. “That’s how we want to keep it.”
In the fifth year of the BLM’s coalition with the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office and other law enforcement agencies to quell the troubles frequently found in the dunes, things seem to have quieted down a bit this holiday season.
“This weekend it’s been pretty slow, actually,” BLM Dunes Manager Neil Hamada said. “People are being a little safer.”
From Wednesday evening through Saturday, Hamada said there were fewer than 100 calls for medical assistance in the Imperial Sand Dunes and Superstition Mountains, though tragically those reports did include the deaths of a 13-year-old Imperial girl Wednesday night and a 24-year-old San Diego man Saturday morning.
“One of the things we’ve been trying to tell folks is to slow down around camps and to slow down in general,” Hamada said, adding that there were more than 130 people representing various law enforcement or medical agencies in the dunes this weekend.
The numbers, while still far more than officials wish for, represent a significant drop from the five deaths and more than 150 medical calls that occurred in OHV hotspots during Thanksgiving weekend last year.
That improvement is a reflection of the increased number of government officials present in the desert this year, and is something those who bring their families to the desert are especially joyful for.
“We try to teach the kids to drive safe, to be aware of what is around them,” Ed Graves of Alta Loma said. “It’s all about having fun and staying safe.”
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