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Marc Giauque reportingIt's enough money to buy a pretty nice house, in a pretty nice neighborhood. UDOT says it spends about four-hundred thousand dollars a year, picking up dead animals from the side of the road. It's a fraction of the cost spent on car repairs. UDOT and the Division of Wildlife Resources reports the number of crashes in up.
It's been the subject of comedies, but in real life, car animal collisions can be traumatic, even dangerous.
"They get startled and then a lot of times run off the road and don't even hit the deer at times."
Russ Hammond knows a thing or two by experience, he's the General Manager at Park City Collision.
"Deer are kind of seasonal. We'll go a couple weeks on and off with and with out, but there will be days when I will have five or ten in one day.
A deer, he says, can cause a lot of damage.
"The average hit probably 75 to 80 percent of the time would be the fender light and back on a door." A moose, is a different story.
" I've only had two survivals that I'm aware of."
Those are driver survivals, not animal survivals. Still, in a decade of crashes involving wildlife, UDOT says a human fatality is rare.
"Despite almost twenty-two thousand hits over ten years there was ten fatalities."
Director of Operations Tracy Conti, though, says the numbers are on the rise.
"The herds are increasing too. It's a couple of mild winters."
Conti and his counterparts from the DWR went before lawmakers recently, to explain, among other things, why it seems to take so long for animal carcasses to be removed from the roadside.
"The maintenance people have a hundred activities, this is one of them."
Conti says thousands of miles of roadway are also under contract, costing the state 400-thousand dollars a year for removal. The focus of the future, he says is in prevention, especially in high hit areas.
"Every project now has the tool kit to use, to look at what different avenues they could use to design it to prevent as many hits as possible."
Wildlife say there are about a third of a million deer in Utah right now, with maybe 60-thousand elk, and about four-thousand Moose.
