( CARTERSVILLE, GA) Today the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety (GOHS) announced a ninety-day high-visibility roll-out of the newly formed THUNDER TASKFORCE totarget high-risk drivers in Paulding and Bartow County this summer. The GOHS TASKFORCE is a specialized traffic enforcement unit designed to help Georgia communities combat abnormally high occurrences of traffic crashes, injuries and fatalities. The TASKFORCE mission is to help reduce those highway deaths and serious injuries by changing the illegal driving behaviors of motorists in the region through an increased law enforcement presence in those high crash corridors.

Paulding and Bartow Counties currently meet that definition of ‘high crash corridor’. Statistically, these counties continue to line-up as the state’s deadliest traffic crash counties outside the Metro Atlanta Area.  Paulding County nowranks Number Seven in the state for traffic fatalities.. and neighboring Bartow County ranks close behind it at Number Nine. . Even more disturbing, Bartow-Paulding County area traffic deaths have already climbed into the deadly double digits in just the first four months of 2008. Ten of those were in Paulding County, with five more in Bartow since January.

By the end of 2007, when the number of Paulding County traffic deaths climbed to 27 and traffic deaths in Bartow County totaled 31 for the year, law enforcement authorities in the region asked the Governor's Office of Highway Safety to plan for THUNDER TASKFORCE enforcement support there this summer. The TASKFORCE goal is to show a significant reduction in traffic fatalities and injuries over the coming three-month period. During its inaugural 90-day mobilization last year, OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER successfullyreduced traffic fatalities in the Savannah Area by 58-percent while working with Savannah-Chatham Metro Police.

The THUNDER TASKFORCE Teams are composed of officers from the Georgia State Patrol and Georgia Motor Carrier Compliance Division deployed in joint operations with a specially-qualified contingent of GOHS H.E.A.T. Units.H.E.A.T. stands for Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic. Last year, GOHS distributed $3.2-million in H.E.A.T. grants, funding nearly 100 traffic enforcement officers in 26 law enforcement agencies around the state to increase safety belt use and reduce speeding and impaired driving crashes.

TASKFORCEH.E.A.T. officers are certified as field sobriety or drug recognition experts, with required training in radar, emergency vehicle operation, pursuit intervention, advanced traffic law, and DUI Breathalyzer equipment operation. Each time it’s launched the GOHS THUNDER TASKFORCE workswith members of community Traffic Enforcement Units from the local requesting agency. During this Paulding-Bartow call-out, THUNDER will work a combined speed and DUI crackdown operation with the Paulding and Bartow County Sheriff’s Offices and other local law enforcement agencies.

The THUNDER strategy applies concentrated patrols on state routes and interstate highways over a three month period. TASKFORCE officers conduct day-and-night safetybelt and sobriety roadchecks on local roadways while collecting enforcement data to document their life-saving progress.

In between weekly waves of THUNDER operations, Paulding and Bartow County Sheriff’s patrols will continue to target high injury and fatality crash locations with an ongoing schedule of concentrated patrols and roadchecks. TASKFORCE Teams will receive logistical support from two regional GOHS Traffic Enforcement Networks, the Western Region Traffic Enforcement Network (WRTEN) and (MATEN II) the Mountain Area Traffic Enforcement Network. WRTEN and MATEN II will provide portable Blood Alcohol Testing “BAT”-Trailers, field-equipped with reporting stations, Intoxilyzers, night operations generators and street lighting-kits, and holding cells to conduct THUNDER sobriety roadchecks.

H.E.A.T. Unit Officers from Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan PD and Clayton and Dekalb County police departments and police departments from the cities of Atlanta, College Park, Duluth, Morrow, Sandy Springs and Winder, along with deputies from Sheriff’s Departments in Barrow County, Bibb, Carroll, Douglas, Hall, Walton and White Counties will make six deployments during the months of June, July, and August to help keep law abiding citizens of Paulding and Bartow County safe on their highways.

For news media information about times and locations of local concentrated patrols and roadchecks during this ninety-day TASKFORCE campaign, contact Georgia State Patrol Captain Joe Hamby at the GSP Cartersville Post at

770-387-3988. Additional information will be available from Bartow County Sheriff Clark Millsap at 770-382-5050 and from Paulding County Sheriff Bruce Harris at 770-443-3010.

On Monday, June 2nd, the GOHS THUNDER TASKFORCE rolls into Cartersville on I-75 at 11AM. The Governor's Office of Highway Safety and the Bartow and Paulding County Sheriff’s Offices are stepping-up enforcement together to drive-down highway deaths. As of June ‘08, the travel forecast here calls for THUNDER!