North Platte,NE : Texting cited in rollover accident on March, Thursday 29th 2018

A woman who was injured in a rollover Thursday night saved her own life, but also could have ended it, a Nebraska state trooper said Friday.

Just before 9:30 p.m., Maxwell and North Platte fire departments were called to mile marker 185 on Interstate 80 near Maxwell. They used the Jaws of Life to pull a woman from her car after she rolled it “multiple times,” said Sgt. Justin Buhlke.

The woman was taken to the hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, Buhlke said.

“I firmly believe if she wasn’t wearing a seat belt, she’d not have been alive,” he said.

But Buhlke said the woman was also texting before the rollover, which he called “the contributing factor.”

April begins Distracted Driving Awareness Month, according to the National Safety Council. As of 2010, texting while driving is illegal in Nebraska as a secondary offense. While a driver can be pulled over for speeding or drinking and driving, someone must have committed such an offense to also be cited for texting and driving.

A bill in this year’s Legislature that would have made texting and driving a primary offense did not advance out of its committee. The bill was introduced by Sen. Bob Krist of Omaha.

“This statute is incredibly difficult to enforce,” said North Platte Police Investigator John Deal, of the current law.

The state law that makes texting while driving illegal also defines “texting” as instant message, email, reading and accessing internet pages, as well as the traditional typed messages on a phone’s message service. However, functions such as “typing directions into Google Maps” aren’t included, Deal said.

In addition, “the officer actually has to see what app the person is using,” Deal said. “Because they may be doing something that isn’t considered texting by law.”

For all those reasons, “we have not written one texting-and-driving citation since the law’s inception,” Deal said.

At the scene of Thursday night’s rollover, Buhlke said no citations were issued.

Source :
Texting cited in rollover accident