Chickamauga Lake Second Only To Ocoee River In Reportable Boating Accidents
by Judy Frank
posted July 23, 2008
In 2007, two women left a bar on the banks of Chickamauga Lake, hopped into their boat – and crashed into the dock, TWRA boating officer Matt Majors said Wednesday.
One of the women was killed, Officer Majors told members of the Advisory Council on Traffic Safety (ACTS) during the group’s regular quarterly meeting.
Unfortunately, such deaths are not uncommon, he said. Of Tennessee’s total 17 boating fatalities last year, three occurred in Hamilton County.
“We led the state,” he noted.
Further, Chickamauga Lake is second only to the Ocoee River in the number of reportable boating accidents in Tennessee,
Boating enforcement officers do what they can to stop the carnage, he said, but there are only three officers for the entire county – not nearly enough to see every violation.
Still, about 50 of the state’s total 126 arrests for Boating Under the Influence (BUI) were made right here in Hamilton County, he said.
Like most DUI officers, he makes most of his arrests at night and on weekends.
“That’s when the drunks are out,” he explained.
Also like DUI officers, he regularly conducts sobriety checks on people he suspects of operating boats while intoxicated. Some of the checks involve simple memory tests such as reciting the letters of the alphabet, he said.
“You’d be surprised how many doctors and lawyers can’t say their ABC’s,” he told the law enforcement officers and other traffic safety authorities attending the meeting. “I never met as many as I have on Chickamauga Lake.”
In addition, he said, boaters suspected of BUI are frequently transported to land where they are asked to walk a straight line, stand on one foot and perform other standard tests for intoxication.
“And when I do a field sobriety test, I don’t go to a boat ramp where there’s nobody around,” he said. “I do my checks at the closest lakeside bar, so the people there can see what’s going on . . . It’s gets quiet as a church.”
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