Demos bring home the dangers of driving too fast to teenage students

Samar Kanafani
Daily Star staff

Classes ended early at a secondary school Thursday to make time for drumming the dangers of speeding into the minds of students nearing the legal driving age.
The 13 to 17-year-olds, who attend the Two Sacred Hearts School in the Mount Lebanon town of Ain Saade, gathered in the playground to watch experts from the Civil Defense and Red Cross dramatize the rescue of a victim from the wreckage of a car accident.
“Let’s keep our heads screwed on the right way; let’s not speed and let’s try to live to be 90 or 100 years old,” school principal Sister Daniella Harrouk told over 400 students.
This was the last in a series of over 120 school presentations this academic year, which the Youth Association for Social Awareness (YASA), a traffic safety group, organized to raise students’ awareness of hazards.
It was also the 50th time it invited the Civil Defense and Red Cross to give realistic rescue demonstrations to children.
“It’s not shameful to like speeding ­ I like speeding ­ but it is shameful to speed in a regular car on a regular road,”  Adel Metny, the two-time Lebanese rally champion and YASA member, who is also on the school’s parent committee, told the students. He explained to the children the structural and mechanical differences between a regular car and a rally car, which can make speeding a fatal hazard in the former but rarely in the latter.
The differences lie in a rally car’s dense metal frame, additional iron roll-cage, special single-piece seats, multi-strap seat belts, automatic fire extinguishing device, rubber gas tank, hidden rubber piping and heavy shock absorbers.
All of this, which a regular car does not have, makes a rally car more grounded and solid, and less likely to catch fire or continue burning, said Metny, who spent $80,000 transforming his regular BMW M3 model into a racing machine.
“Rally drivers also wear fire-proof body suits that allow them to withstand fire for up to five minutes,” Metny told the wide-eyed students. “To top all this off, our roads are not made for speeding,” he said, adding: “Don’t forget, there’s someone waiting for you at home.”
As enthralled as the students were by the race star, it was the two rescue operations that made jaws drop and minds open.
“Speed has it’s time and place,” said Civil Defense representative, Youssef Khoury, before talking the students through the two demonstrations. The first involved hoisting a car into the air with a rubber blow-up pump to remove a person from underneath, the second peeling a car roof off with heavy-duty electric shears, known as the “jaws of life,” to rescue the driver.
“My dad warned me about not speeding, but I never knew I could find myself in that situation if I did speed. I never thought of it that way,” said Elie Jeara, 17, after the presentation.
Jeara, whose father recently taught him how to drive, admitted he has wanted to speed a number of times, but said he “never went over 100 kilometers per hour on a highway.”
According to Khoury, the demonstration was based on a scenario in which the car crashed at the speed of 120 kilometers per hour. According to YASA president Ziad Aql, 100,000 children in 200 schools have been treated to these types of demonstrations since 1997, when the association expanded its traffic safety campaign to include schools.

Useful toll-free hot lines: Red Cross 140, Civil Defense 125, Police 112

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