WESTBROOK – Westbrook police will be conducting saturation patrols and sobriety checkpoints in an effort to remove impaired drivers from the road this holiday season with grant funding in the amount of $10,000 from the Maine Bureau of Highway Safety.

Police will be staffing sobriety checkpoints at various locations, as well as having officers patrol in marked and unmarked cars to look for impaired drivers.

Nationally, alcohol-impaired motor vehicle crashes cost more than an estimated $37 billion annually, police said. In 2010, more than 10,000 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes one every 51 minutes.

According to Capt. Tom Roth, Westbrook police take the problem of impaired drivers very seriously and officers on all shifts actively seek these drivers. Having grant funding available to dedicate officers just to impaired drivers allows the officers to concentrate their efforts on this task without being taken away for regular calls for service.

“This grant funding allows us to focus our efforts on a problem that affects everyone who travels through Westbrook,” Roth said.

Westbrook police will continue their impaired driver enforcement efforts through the holiday season and into 2013.