TULSA, Okla. — More safety improvements are on the way for some of the state’s most dangerous interchanges aimed at stopping wrong-way drivers and the tragic consequences they leave behind.
Now, that program is expanding.
While the growing pilot program is too late for one Oklahoma family, they’re hoping to prevent tragedy from striking other families.
The journey along I-40 near Henryetta, past a recently installed wrong-way driver detection system, brings a flood of emotions for Jeff and Kristy Murrow.
“Life changed in a moment. It’s definitely the worst day of your life,” Jeff says.
It hurts their heart to think, and to wonder, how dramatically different their lives would be now if there had been such a system along a stretch of highway in the Oklahoma City area a couple of years ago, where Marissa, their 19-year-old daughter was tragically killed by a drunk, wrong-way driver.
It was a little past midnight when a trooper knocked on their front door.
Kristy asks, “Where would she be today, you know? She’d be in her senior year of college now, preparing for her life, all the hopes and dreams that she had.”
Dreams all dashed, in the blink of an eye, by that drunk, wrong-way driver.
Just like the 500 or so victims who die across the country every year in wrong-way driving tragedies, according to AAA.
Now, Jeff and Kristy, make Marrisa’s life and death, their mission.
“I want to make Marissa’s life count for something. She made sure her life counted and impacted so many people with her life. And this is a way to take it and say, what can we do, to make sure this doesn’t keep happening,” Jeff tells us.
Every day, every week, every month, the Murrows dedicate themselves to educate, advocate, and lobby for changes to put the brakes on drunk and wrong-way driving.
It’s what Marissa, they say, would want them to do.
“We learned so much from her. Normally, parents try to teach their children, but Marissa put other people first. Her favorite scripture was let everything you do, be cone in love. And that’s the way she lived her life.”
And the Murrows are encouraged to hear that the four wrong-way driving detection systems along I-40 in Eastern Oklahoma are just the beginning. ODOT recently awarded contacts to have the same system installed at another 14 key interchanges across the state.
“The severity of these crashes is almost always fatal,” ODOT spokesperson Lisa Salim says;
The very reason, she says, why stopping wrong-way driving has quickly risen up the ranks of critical, necessary safety improvements.
“We send our heartfelt condolences to any family that has suffered a tragedy like this," Salim says.
The wrong-way driving detection system includes bright, blinking, LED warning lights. Radar and thermal sensors trigger them when a driver enters a wrong-way zone.
Designers say it’s especially effective, for catching the attention of drunk drivers. The system includes an alert activation zone, a self-correction zone, and a confirmation zone.
If a wrong-way driver doesn’t turn around, the expanded system sends out an alert automatically, to nearby law enforcement and to message signs, warning other drivers.
“That’s what you want, that would have saved her,” Kristy says.
Saved their daughter, the Murrows believe. Now, though, they pray, and they're hopeful, it will save others.
“This is just something you never want another father, another mother to ever get a call, get a knock on the door.”
A knock, that changes lives, forever.
“Yeah, there’s pain, it’s agonizing when I see a picture, or I see a video of her singing, just the joy she radiated, there’s a lot of pain with that, but there’s more pain to feel like she’s forgotten,” Jeff told us.
But Marrisa could never be forgotten. Not by her family, not by her friends, who celebrated Marissa’s 21st birthday, at her grave.
Yes, as painful, as hurtful, as heart-wrenching it can be, the Murrows move on, gazing ahead, to even more lifesaving changes on the horizon.
“It reminds me, somebody else’s daughter is going to make it home.”
Changes can help fill life’s journey with joy, not heartbreak.
The 14 new wrong-way driver detection systems will soon be installed at key interchanges along 1-40 between Oklahoma City and the Texas state line… and along I-35 between Oklahoma County and the Kansas state line.
The eight-million-dollar cost of the pilot programs is covered by a federal grant.
Some of that money will also be used to make safety improvements at more than 70 other interchanges, which include new traditional wrong-way signs, updated striping on ramps, and raised pavement markers that show red if a driver is traveling the wrong way.
Eventually, ODOT hopes to link all those self-contained wrong-way detection systems to that expanded system which will allow them to display warnings to other drivers on message signs.
Contact the Problem Solvers:
- 918-748-1502
- problemsolvers@kjrh.com
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