Three Rivers, Three Colleges, And $3 Pitchers Of Beer Make A Deadly Combination.
MayorBob.
Posted to Etcetera on Fri Oct 27, 2006 at 02:27:08 PM EST. RSS.
Although the headline reads like the title of a Country & Western tune, it encapsulates the combination of circumstances which have a Wisconsin town looking for answers. The question that La Crosse, Wisconsin city officials are trying to answer is what to do to prevent any further senseless deaths in their town?
The deaths they are trying to avoid are drownings in the rivers which run through La Crosse. Town officials already know the causes of the drownings - college undergrads with too much booze in their system make lousy swimmers. Luke Homan, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse basketball player was the latest lousy swimmer in town. His body was pulled from the Mississippi River a few weeks ago. Homan's autopsy indicated his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit at 0.32 percent. Homan became the eighth college-aged man in La Crosse to die in such a fashion over the last nine years. The current streak began with the alcohol-related drowning of a 19-year-old back in July of 1997.
Alcohol-related drownings are nothing new in La Crosse; the first one was recorded back in 1867. The current streak has people perplexed because they all involve college-aged men from one of three schools in La Crosse: UW-La Crosse, Viterbo University, and Western Wisconsin Technical College. Thousands of undergrads at these three schools they find themselves in the middle of what police call "a culture of binge drinking." Downtown bars offer unlimited possibilities to young drinkers, with very little encouragement to moderation or self-discipline. Bars offer regular specials such as "all you can drink for $5", dollar a shot nights, and $3 pitchers of beer until 1:30am. Even Mayor Mark Johnsrud doesn't see much hope, "I'm not sure anything we do can prevent a future tragedy."
Local residents recently met with members of an alcohol oversight committee to offer their thoughts on the problem. Ideas such as erecting a fence, gates, or sets of lights along the river were heard as they were heard two years before after the seventh drowning victim was pulled out of the river. A local editorial stressed that the river wasn't the problem -- the problem lay with people's inability to stop drinking when they're falling down drunk. According to one undergrad, the promotion and encouragement of drinking is the cause of the problem, "the culture is already up on a pedestal in this town." Some of the other recommendations included cutting off sales of shots at 10:30pm and celebrating Oktoberfest over one weekend, rather than a week-long event.
Mayor Johnsrud doesn't like the idea of fences or gates - he doesn't want to spoil "the natural beauty" of the riverside or give anyone any ideas about the river being a "playground" for drinkers. City council will consider the idea of motion-sensitive lights along the river to startle drinkers. However, with a price tag of $60,000, the lighting idea moved one alderman to comment that "squirrels and bunnies" would likely set them off. Some students have been forming riverside patrols to look for over-imbibers straying too close to the river. School authorities believe the answer comes from a concerted community effort to warn students of the dangers of binge drinking, hopefully leading to a bit more self awareness on the part of the students.
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