Phuket holiday road deaths at provincial average – so far

PHUKET: New Year’s Day in Thailand saw 686 road accidents kill 70 people and injure another 737, bringing the cumulative casualty count for the long holiday to 238 deaths and 2,725 injuries from 2,510 accidents.

Of the 238 deaths, 3 have been recorded in Phuket, in line with the average for the country’s 78 provinces. But Phuket’s serious injury count, at 56, stands well over the provincial average of 35. Serious injuries are defined as those requiring hospitalization.

Uthairat Chaiprasert, assistant to the Thai justice minister in Bangkok, said yesterday that Friday’s road casualties had surpassed the carnage for the first day of last year by 37% for deaths and 50% for injuries.

Half of the traffic accidents on the fourth of the ‘Seven Days of Danger’, the name given to the government’s current holiday accident reduction campaign, were blamed on drunken driving, followed by speeding at 20.7%, he said.

Most accidents, 84.9%, involved motorcycles and occurred between 4pm and 8pm. Checkpoints stopped 715,516 vehicles and arrested 69,515 motorists, with the main offense being not carrying a driver’s license (23,006 cases), followed by bikers not wearing a helmet (21,195 cases).

While Yasothon was the only province to report no accidents at all, Nakhon Si Thammarat had the most at 83, followed by Phetchabun at 82 and Chiang Mai at 80.

Chanthaburi and Ayutthaya were the most deadly at 10 deaths each, while Phetchabun had the most injuries at 99, followed by Nakhon Si Thammarat at 98.

Here in Phuket, three people died and 56 more suffered injuries requiring hospital admittance during the first four days of the campaign. The first fatality was a six-year-old boy, killed when the motorcycle he was riding on was hit by a pick-up truck in Phuket’s Thalang District.

Phuket’s second fatality was an 86-year-old man riding without a helmet when he was run over by a car in Karon. The third victim was a 43-year-old man who ran into a concrete power pole on a private road in Koh Kaew.

For more details of Phuket’s road casualties during the campaign to date, click here.

The seven-day national safe-driving campaign ends at midnight tomorrow.

— Nation & Gazette Reporters