On the chilly evening of March 3rd, Jim Dougan had a few happy-hour drinks with business buddies at the Warbonnet Inn before stopping at the Star Lanes Bowling Alley.
At about 10 p.m., he hit the road, breezing west outside of town along a dark, snow-packed I-90. He only went nine miles when his 1995 Dodge pickup skidded off the right shoulder, hit a slope and rolled over repeatedly. He died instantly of massive head injuries.Dougan, a shy 52-year-old credit union manager who liked to bowl and help manage the semi-pro Copper Kings baseball team, wasn't wearing a seat belt. He was also driving too fast for the weather and his blood-alcohol level that night was twice the legal limit.
His accident, though, was no freak.
Within two miles of the crash site near mile marker 215, four other fatal wrecks occurred on I-90 in the past two years. Killed were men and women in their prime: a college student, dry waller, cook and homemaker.
Here in Silver Bow County where Butte's gold-rush days are long gone but its hard-drinking ways remain, there are more fatal crashes on I-90 for every mile traveled than on any other interstate stretch in America.
And there's little question why. People drive too fast, especially when the weather turns bad, or they drive after hitting the bars that dot nearly every street. The out-of-state tourists sometimes nod off as they cross Big Sky Country.
"We're like the Bermuda Triangle of interstate accidents," says Dan Hollis, Silver Bow County coroner, referring to the local stretches of both I-90 that runs from Boston to Seattle and to I-15 that drops south from Canada to the California border with Mexico.
But Montana is not unusual. A computer-aided investigation by Hearst Newspapers, which analyzed every interstate death nationwide between 1990 and 1994, reveals that the interstates with the highest fatal crash rates are all in remote Western areas - not urban ones.
Los Angeles' interstates have the highest number of fatal accidents, because they're so heavily traveled. Yet their fatality rates - the number of deaths per mile traveled - are quite low.
In contrast, some of the isolated Western stretches are actually the deadliest.
Second on the killer list, after Butte's I-90, is I-70 in Utah's Emery County, a scenic highway that winds through Castle Valley in the eastern part of the state.
Next is the I-15 stretch, in southwestern Montana's Beaverhead County, that Dan Hollis mentioned
The fourth most lethal stretch is I-25 in New Mexico's San Miguel County, which runs parallel to the Santa Fe Trail.
Fifth is I-10 in Crockett County, a remote southern part of Texas where some folks talk distances in beer volume - as in, "Oh, that's about a six pack," a throwback to the era when state law allowed a driver to drink behind the wheel.
Out here, fatal crash rates are many times the national average.
On I-90 in Silver Bow County, for example, there were 6.2 fatal crashes for every 100 million miles traveled between 1990 and 1994. Nationwide, there were 0.65 such crashes for the same distance.
In Montana alone, a state that has fewer people than the city of San Antonio, there were 168 fatal crashes on interstates in that five-year period.
At first glance, the death toll may seem surprising because interstates are the safest highways overall in America. They're designed to high standards. They usually have good signage, wide lanes, shoulders, medians and other safety features.
As a result, their fatality rate is less than half the average for all highways.
Still, an increasing number of people die on interstates every year. And the figure is expected to rise further because Congress just repealed the national speed limit.
Last year alone, interstates claimed the lives of 4,694 people nationally - the same toll that would pile up if a jetliner crashed every week, killing everyone on board.
"Society has simply accepted the fact we kill people in unbelieveable numbers on highways," says Bud Wright, director of the Office of Highway Safety at the Federal Highway Administration.
Every time a plane crashes, he says it makes the front page of a newspaper. But that doesn't happen with car accidents, which kill people gradually in ones and twos at every hour across the nation.
More people die every year in accidents on the nation's roads - at least 41,000 - than from AIDS, drugs or guns. For those under age 43, a traffic crash is still the most likely single cause of death.
And this represents progress. Fatality rates were much higher two decades ago when states did not have the strict laws on drinking and seat-belt use that most have today. Cars have also gained air bags, anti-lock brakes and shoulder-strap seat belts.
Yet ironically, as cars get safer, some drivers take more risks. "They have a false sense of what they can trade off," says Judith Stone, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a consumer safety group.
Also ironically, as the road improves, drivers pick up speed. "When people get on an interstate, they tend to go like h--- because they're on a good road," says John McPherson, sheriff of Silver Bow County.
Studies show that simply repaving a road worsens safety because a driver's foot gets heavier as the surface gets smoother.
What's most likely to cause a fatal crash?
While road conditions contribute to nearly a third of them, driver error is a factor in almost every crash. Speed and fatigue are key problems, but alcohol remains the single largest factor - despite improved awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving.
Drivers have to pay attention because even the best roads are only designed so people can safely drive up to 70 miles per hour - in good weather, says Richard Redding, senior transportation engineer at the Insurance Institute for Safety.
So, too, seat belts and air bags are only designed to work up to a certain speed, beyond which a crash's impact is just too strong. "You can't repeal the law of physics," says Redding.
But too often, he adds: "Drivers themselves can't recognize their own limits."