PHOTOS FROM THE OPERATION ZERO TOLERANCE PRESS CONFERENCE AT ATLANTA MOTOR SPEEDWAY--JUNE 23, 2005

The message is simple. You drive impaired in Georgia, you WILL go to jail. It is Zero-Tolerance (OZT). During the July 4th holiday travel period, state and local law enforcement officers will blanket Georgia's roadways with high visibility OZT sobriety checkpoints and concentrated patrols. Safe drivers will be handed brochures, but motorists who drive drunk will be handcuffed and jailed.

The Governor's Office of Highway Safety (GOHS) is mobilizing officers from more than 500 law enforcement agencies throughout the state for OZT duty from Friday, June 24 through Monday, July 4, 2005. And while OZT mobilizations are underway in Georgia, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will be sponsoring similiar life-saving campaigns on roadways across the Southeast and the nation.

"We're targeting travel periods when impaired driving and July 4th holiday traffic volumes are historically the highest on your state roadways," said GOHS Director Bob Dallas. "We enforce OZT because drunk and drugged drivers in Georgia cause an average of 530 deaths every year. Impaired drivers here cause a third of Georgia's total traffic fatalities."

The July 4th holiday OZT campaign is part of the One Hundred Days of Summer HEAT initiative launched by the Governor's Office of Highway Safety. Summer HEAt will run through the end of the Labor Day holiday travel period in September. Law enforcement officers will be patrolling the state's roadways all summer long during Summer HEAT to raise driver awareness about the deadly consequences of speed, drunk and drugged driving, and failure to use safety belts and child restraints.

The Press Conference at Atlanta Motor Speedway was a huge success. Speakers such as Ed Clark, President and General Manager of Atlanta Motor Speedway, WSB Radio Traffic Personality Captain Herb Emory, NHTSA's Belinda Jackson, Coweta County Sheriff Mike Yaeger, MADD's Larry Hanawalt, DeKalb County Prosecutor Shawn Lagrua, Griffin Police Chief Frank Strickland, Former State Representative Donzella James, Georgia State Patrol PIO Larry Schnall, and State Representative Jill Chambers (from the Public Safety Subcommittee) provided ample reasons why it is important not to drink and drive. The event was dramaticlly punctuated with a balloon-release of more than sixteen hundred balloons, one for each traffic death the previous year (30% of which were colored red to represent alcohol related deaths).

Click on each photograph for a larger image.

Additional thanks goes out to the Richard Petty Driving Experience and Inflated Egos for their assistance during this event