By John Dobberstein, Editor
More than a half dozen times since last December, vehicles have plowed into retail stores in Broken Arrow, scaring patrons, shutting down businesses and racking up thousands in damages and lost revenue. Miraculously, nobody has been seriously injured or killed.
Some social media sleuths speculated the accidents might be an organized effort to attack certain businesses or scam money from insurance companies — or even a latent symptom of COVID-19 vaccinations. But the Broken Arrow Police Department told the Sentinel the causes have mostly been driver error.
The most recent crash happened Sept. 10 in the Hillside Drive shopping area in north Broken Arrow, after an SUV plowed into the Five Guys burger joint.
Old World Pizza, a fixture in the New Orleans Square retail area in south Broken Arrow, was struck on Sept. 6 by a vehicle for the second time this year. In the first incident last March, a Cadillac sedan smashed into the front of the pizzeria and rolled inside the building, impacting the rear wall.
A week prior, a vehicle fleeing police stuck the side of a Sonic restaurant on Kenosha Street, narrowly missing two employees in the building who were cleaning up for the night.
Last July, a vehicle emerging from a parking spot crashed through the side of Bruno’s Italian Ristorante, which did not result in injuries. In May a driver lost control of a U-Haul pickup and plowed into the Taco Bueno restaurant in New Orleans Square (just to the west of Old World Pizza), which forced the restaurant remain closed for months.
And in early January, a vehicle crashed into the front of JADE on Main retail store in the Rose District. No injuries were reported.
Four of the six parking lot incidents (excluding the police chase) were caused by driver confusion between the gas and brake pedals while trying to park or leave a parking lot, said Aaron McColloch, the city of Broken Arrow’s communication’s director.
Another incident was driver confusion between the reverse and drive gears while trying to park or leave a parking spot, and the final was caused by a driver who struck a curb in the parking lot, overcorrected and collided with the building.
Drivers in the parking lot incidents were not cited for inattentive driving or other offenses. Six of the 7 incidents happened in private parking lots, “which are generally outside the city’s control,” McColloch says. “Inattentive driving is not a citable offense in a private parking lot.”
He noted that there are approximately 200 vehicle collisions in Broken Arrow each month, and about 2,400 annually, which means the building collisions are only a minor amount.
“Broken Arrow Police Department’s Traffic Safety Unit routinely evaluates trends to identify education, engineering, and enforcement needs. While vehicle collisions into buildings are newsworthy, BAPD has not identified a specific trend in reference to these collisions,” McColloch said.
Chain of Events
Many Broken Arrow residents this year were shocked at the incidents as they piled up this spring and summer, and they questioned how it continued to happen and why.
There are some databases that track vehicle-into-buildings crashes across the U.S., but the data set drawing the most public attention in recent years is compiled by Rob Reiter, a perimeter safety consultant and co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council.
Reiter and his associates have, over the last decade, painstakingly compiled a database with more than 32,000 incidents logged across the U.S. The Council searches out information on vehicle-into-building crashes, limited to commercial or public buildings, transit stops, public areas and other non-residential structures.
Anecdotal and media reports, court records, police and fire department records, published studies and corporate-supplied data revealed in litigation are analyzed for details such as cause, age of driver, type of building and other information and cross-checked for accuracy using court documents and police reports when available.
SSC has founded the Storefront Safety Initiative, which provides free resources to those working to increase pedestrian safety where people eat, work, play and shop. SSC works with industry and government officials to educate and promote building codes by increasing the participation of business owners, property owners, developers, design professionals and public servants.
The organization believes the implementation of “common-sense standards of care” will help to prevent substantial injuries and loss of life.
So far, the SSC has found:
- The age of drivers involved in vehicle vs. building crashes skews toward those age 60 and over (39%), with those under age 30 (29%) and 30-60 years making up the rest.
- The most frequent locations for incidents includes restaurants (19%), retail stores (23%), commercial buildings (11%), convenience stores (6%) and offices (8%).
- The most frequent accident cause are pedal error (20%), operator error (21%), DUIs (15%) and traffic accidents (12%).
- Storefront crashes happen more than 100 times a day across the U.S. About 46% of the crashes result in injury, with 16,000 people a year are injured and 2,600 people are killed.
Even with all the data, Reiter estimates his group may only be documenting 1 in 12 of the actual incidents that occur.
Broken Arrow isn’t the only city that appears to have an obsession with cars crashing into buildings: In January, news station NBC4 in Columbus, Ohio reported that the phenomenon had sparked the creation of social media pages such as “Columbus Carikaze” on Instagram.
Paul Meara, who with his roommate started the account, said he believes the public fascination with the crashes is due to unknown details behind each occurrence.
A battalion chief for the Columbus Division of Fire said that between January and June of 2024, firefighters were dispatched to 102 incidents of a building into a structure. The year ended with 139 incidents, down from 279 in 2023 and 313 in 2022.
Cleaning Up and Moving on
Back in Broken Arrow, some of the damaged businesses were able to make repairs quickly and were back open in days. But the Taco Bueno on New Orleans Street was closed for more than 2 months after a rented U-haul pickup truck smashed into the drive-through bay.
Old World Pizza was closed for 7 weeks after the March incident while repairs and replacements were made that cost thousands of dollars.
There is a high curb at the end of the parking spaces in front of the pizzeria, but no bollard, planters or even parking curbs to stop an errant vehicle.
The owners, Bob and Lyly Neal, said in a Facebook post he planned to have concrete planters or barriers put up to protect his store. Their landlord called to get more information about the accident, which they said was “traumatizing.”
“Just in case we don’t get what we need I will do something, even if it needs to be inside our store,” they wrote. “We will do anything and everything to protect our customers and our staff inside our store.”
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