DATE: Tuesday, August 5, 1997               TAG: 9708050053

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ERIK BROOKS, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: MILWAUKEE                         LENGTH:   48 lines

CAR ``ACCIDENTS'' PASSE; U.S. FAVORS ``CRASHES''

Good news! The government says you'll never get into an auto accident again.

It has stopped using the word ``accident'' in favor of the no-nonsense ``crash.''

Crash, shmash, says Tom Rehbeck, an AAA district manager.

``An accident is an accident,'' Rehbeck says. ``Whatever they call it, a car's not working, and we have to come and tow it.''

American Family Insurance agent Scott Wolfe agrees: ``It's a waste of time. They should not even be fooling around with this. They have bigger fish to fry.''

The U.S. Transportation Department decided to stop describing these convergences of chrome as accidents to hold people more accountable for their actions.

``If you call something an accident, you are saying it's fate, it's an act of God, it's something you can't foresee,'' says Tim Hurd, media director for the department's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. ``It's not accidental that one person survives a crash wearing a seat belt and one person goes through a window and dies.''

The change has been in the works for years but may have finally hit home a few weeks ago with the release of the report formerly known as the Fatal Accident Reporting System, listing all deadly accidents in the United States.

The 1996 report is the Fatal Analysis Reporting System.

This year, NHTSA also launched a public awareness program called ``Crashes Aren't Accidents.''

Tell it to Howard Sieber, 76, who decades ago was hit from behind while driving in one of Chicago's nasty winter storms. ``It was an accident. I don't know what else you could call it. He couldn't stop on the ice,'' he says.

The Wisconsin Transportation Department is also dropping ``accident'' in most publications. The annual ``Accident Facts'' is now ``Crash Facts.'' The department still files ``accident reports,'' but those may be gone someday, too.

Terry Witkowski, safety director at the Milwaukee Police Department, says they've been using the word ``crash'' for a while.

``But there's just times when it doesn't sound right,'' Witkowski says, pondering whether a pedestrian could ever be involved in a ``crash.''

(At the U.S. Transportation Department, the manual says such a case would be described as a ``pedestrian killed or injured in a single-vehicle crash.'') KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT TRAFFIC CRASH

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