ILLINOIS TAKES ACTION AGAINST CARLESS DRIVERS

Illinois has enacted a law that imposes stiff fines on drivers who don't proceed cautiously around parked emergency vehicles.

The law imposes a fine of up to $10,000 on drivers who disobey it. The facts speak for themselves:

* Chicago firefighter Scott Gillen was killed in December when a car that roared past flares and emergency lights at an accident scene crushed him against a fire truck.

* In the days after Gillen was killed, a Kankakee County sheriff's deputy was struck and killed as he assisted a tow-truck driver on the side of the road, and in the span of 12 hours a paramedic and another Chicago firefighter were also struck by vehicles.

* Illinois State Police report that of 162 of the agency's cruisers involved in crashes from January 1998 to last December, 88 were parked with their emergency lights flashing.

The new law is known as Scott's Law, named after Gillen, and state and law-enforcement officials hope it will make people drive more carefully when they approach emergency situations.

With so many accidents at emergency scenes, Illinois needed to do something. State Rep. Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro, who sponsored the measure, should be commended for seeing to it that something was done.