Report: Nevada making progress in slowing DUI deaths

By Kyle B. Hansen

Friday, Dec. 10, 2010 | 4:15 p.m.

Despite free-flowing drinks available in Las Vegas, Nevada has one of the country’s lowest rates of death due to drunken driving and has seen a large decrease in the number of such deaths in the past decade, according to a report out today.

The Silver State had 68 deaths last year involving drunken drivers, according to the State of Drunk Driving Fatalities in America 2009 report by the Century Council, a nonprofit established by eight distillers to fight drunken driving.

That ties with California for the 10th lowest drunken driving death rate, with 2.6 deaths per 100,000 residents.

Nevada had the largest drop of any state in the number of deaths from 2008 to 2009 and had the second highest drop over the past decade, the report said.

The state’s alcohol-impaired driving fatality rate dropped 53.5 percent from 1998 to 2009, the report says. That’s 0.1 percentage points behind Utah, which saw the largest decline.

Deaths that are a result of drunken driving are down across most of the nation. Last year, 10,839 people died from alcohol-related driving, a 49 percent drop from 1982, when such statistics were first tracked, the report says.

The national drunken driving annual death rate was 3.5 per 100,000 residents. Wyoming had a rate of 8.6, the highest in the country, and Utah had a 1.4 rate, the lowest.

The report is based largely on data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.