road kill on regional highways
Video: The Gutsiest Job in the West
Each year, 253,000 animal/vehicle crashes are recorded on four million miles of U.S. roadways. Here in the West, perhaps moreso than other places, dodging wildlife, dead or alive, is part of the driving experience. But what happens after you get the last glimpse of carnage in your rearview mirror? Larry Connell drives up.By Anne Medley, 7-24-08
Not many want Larry Connell’s job. But after 29 years of removing road kill from Montana’s highways for the Montana Department of Transportation, he still has a sense of humor.
“If you get these soon enough, you can eat ‘em. From one grill to another, you know?”
Across four million miles of roads in the United States, 253,000 animal/ vehicle accidents occur annually, with 90 percent of those accidents involving deer. According to a Montana Department of Transportation advisory issued in 2005, collisions between automobiles and large animals have quadrupled in the past 20 years.
NewWest.Net’s Anne Medley spent a day with Connell as he picked up casualties of the road and transported them to one of several composting pits designed to turn road kill into soil in 45 days.
Due to the graphic content of this video, viewer discretion is advised.
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Comments
It's truly a privelege to gag and retch while bicycling in traffic through the cloud of stench each day. And those flies!! Dairies, stockyards, and feedlots can't even begin to compete with the dipterous volume and variety the Department of Transportation imports to Missoula each day in the form of maggots on roadkill. Not only that, but since different mammal species tend to culture unique flora, combining all these kinds of roadkill could be providing a greater variety of bacteria for the flies to carry to our tables. Yet another example of Missoulian's celebration of diversity! It's certainly worth a full-time salary with benefits and all the $4 gas the truck can consume just to keep those carcasses from decomposing by themselves out in the boonies somewhere. People in other towns would have to travel many miles to get that kind of exposure. What a great Eco-Tourism destination!! We should build an interpretive center with alfresco dining all the way around the composting facility so that people could fully enjoy the flies and stench no matter which way the breeze blows.