All along the Grand Strand and Pee Dee, South Carolina Highway Patrol officers are bracing for a busy weekend.
"We're going to team up with our local law enforcement agencies try and put that extra enforcement out there," said L. Cpl. Sonny Collins.
The effort is a part of the agencies Sober or Slammer campaign and they're hoping for a lot fewer than the seven fatalities that happened during the new year's weekend last year.
There's usually an increase of deadly crashes during this time of the year because more people are on the road and more people tend drive irresponsibly, Collins said.
"Plan ahead. Whether it's going to be a designated driver, whether it's going to be staying where you're at, calling a taxi cab, make those decisions before you get there," he said. "Because if you wait till you get to the party, you're consuming alcohol then you make bad decisions."
Since the 2012 Sober or Slammer campaign started on December 14th, 35 people have died in South Carolina crashes.
That's already up from the 27 deaths during the 2011 campaign, and there's four more days left in this year's campaign.
Collins attributes a majority of those deaths to three things.
"Just about all of them come back to DUI, seat belts or speeding," Collins added.
And while you're driving this weekend, you might see officers patrolling certain areas more often.
"We're constantly looking at all this data that comes in from these crashes, looking at where we need to put people, where we are seeing the trends and that dictates many times where you see troopers working."
Troopers will be out at every hour of the day, not just during the night time hours because they've seen an increase in daytime drunk driving cases, Collins said.
With South Carolina and Clemson football bowl games during the day this weekend, they expect even more drivers making bad decisions.
Highway Patrol asks drivers to call *HP if they see someone they suspect is driving while impaired.
