Pieces of junk on Missouri’s roads could be making this state one of the most dangerous to travel. You might have heard of them as “road gators”, chunks of tire left on the road. A national survey shows those and other pieces of debris make Missouri roads the third worst in the nation for deaths caused by that junk. Missouri Department of Transportation spokesperson Sally Oxenhandler says too many times it’s stuff people have not tied down properly. Oxenhandler says drivers need to do a better job when they come upon such debris. She says that, too often, people overract when they see the debris and lose control of their vehicle. She says MODOT does have a program to clean things up. The Triple A survey claims that only Texas and Florida had more deaths between 1999 and 2001 caused by road debris, but Oxenhandler points out not every state was surveyed.
