Daylight-saving time involves more than ‘spring ahead’

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March 13, 2010

Anonymous The Daily Star Sat Mar 13, 2010, 10:10 AM EST

Daylight-saving time commences this weekend, with the usual encouragements to make sure that when you move your clocks ahead an hour _ the change actually happens at 2 a.m. Sunday _ you also change the batteries in your smoke detectors.

This is good advice, in that while more than 90 percent of homes in the United States have smoke detectors, a third of them are thought to have dead or missing batteries.

But daylight-saving time _ which begins in most of the country on the second Sunday in March and lasts until the first Sunday in November _ can be pretty interesting. We learned, for instance, that a man who had been born just after midnight during daylight-saving time had a Vietnam-era draft number based on his birth date that would have sent him into the service.

But he successfully argued that since he was born in Delaware, and that state used standard time instead of daylight-saving time to officially record births, his birthday was actually the previous day. That day, according to the webexhibits. org website, allowed him to avoid getting drafted.

Again, according to the website, in September 1999, three Palestinian terrorists planting bombs designed to blow up two buses carrying passengers in Israel were themselves killed because their bombs went off an hour early owing to Israel having just switched back to standard time.

U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration statistics show violent crime is down 10 percent to 13 percent during daylightsaving time.

The U.S. Department of Transportation says daylight-saving time cuts the country’s electricity usage by about 1 percent a day.

Daylight-saving time does cause an occasional problem. In many states, bars that stay open after 2 a.m. lose an hour of drinking time when daylight-saving time begins. That has led to disturbances in several cities, none worse that those in 1997 and 1998 at Ohio University in Athens.

More than 1,000 students were not happy about the bars closing, rioted and threw liquor bottles at the police, leading to 47 arrests in ’97 alone.

The time change is also troublesome for Amtrak, which has a policy stating that its trains cannot leave a station before their scheduled time. So, when standard time kicks in, trains will stop in towns at 2 a.m. and have to wait an hour before getting going again. In the spring, all of the Amtrak trains automatically are an hour behind schedule at 2 a.m.

So, there’s a lot more to the whole process than just “spring ahead, fall back.” By the way, the first day of spring is next Saturday. Enjoy the extra hour in the evening.