On Saturday night, the sports suffered perhaps its worst crash in decades when eight spectators were killed and 12 injured in a race in the Mojave Desert called the California 200. Shortly after the start of the 200-mile race, one of the competing trucks sailed off a rock pile and rolled into a crowd.
As dozens of people ran and screamed, the truck landed upside down in a column of dust. The driver was not hurt and some witnesses, according to The Associated Press, said he had to flee to escape angry spectators, although others disputed that account.
“There were just bodies everywhere,” Dave Conklin, a photographer covering the event told The A.P.. “One woman with a major head wound was lying in a pool of blood. Someone else was crushed beneath the car.”
Another witness, Matt March, 24, of Wildomar, Calif., told the wire service that the truck “hit the rock and just lost control and tumbled.”
Mr. March said he and other spectators lifted the truck and found four people lying unconscious who had been pinned underneath.
Helicopters airlifted the injured, though the location is so remote that it took half an hour to reach it. Six people died at the scene and two others died at Loma Linda University Medical Center. It was not clear why the driver lost control of the truck.
Advocates for the sport say that one of its attractions is that it is literally more freewheeling than, say, NASCAR races of stock cars. There are no barriers shielding the crowd, except for snow fencing at the start and finish lines, and crowds tend to cluster around those quirks in the terrain that will offer the most thrills, like the rock pile “jump” where Saturday night’s crash occurred.
“A lot of spectators were congested in one area to see the vehicle go into the air, and that’s entertainment for the spectators,” said Wayne Nosala, a regional director for legislation for the California Off-Road Vehicle Association and a desert racer himself who heard from friends who were at the race.
“The unwritten rule is you stay 100 feet from the course, but some people stay within five feet of the course. And when the truck got out of control, the crowd was there when it should have been back 100 feet,” he said.
He said that the promoters of such races — like the one that operated Saturday’s, Mojave Desert Racing — cannot afford the manpower to keep spectators back and often rely on federal and state land managers who normally patrol the desert to try to keep the crowd back.
Beyond racing, millions of people like to take off-road vehicles — specially adapted trucks, cars and motorcycles — over desert and other natural terrain. In California, there are over 1 million people who have purchased “green stickers,” essentially licenses that allow them to drive vehicles over rough terrain.
California is one of only a few states that permit desert racing — some are allowed in Nevada and Arizona — and only a few locations can hold them. In the Mojave, Mr. Nosala said, a half dozen races are held a year, often at night to avoid blistering daytime temperatures.
The 40-year-old sport has been attacked in the past by some environmental groups, who says its endangers animal and plant species like the desert tortoise, the Mojave ground squirrel and the kangaroo rat, but advocates argue that other forces like suburban development are a bigger threat to those species.
In 1994, Mr. Nosala said, President Bill Clinton signed an act barring most of the American desert from being used for races.
Via: NY Times
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