The most common fatal car wreck in Wyoming is so familiar to Lt. Larry Jordan, he knows the stench.

The leaking battery acid, the fuming motor oil, and, about a third of the time, a trace of alcohol blend together, and choke him most every time dispatch calls him to the site of a one-car rollover.

"That smell is in your memory as a trooper, even after you retire," said Jordan, a 23-year veteran of the Wyoming Highway Patrol.

The images, like white crosses on a roadside, remain long after the wreck. He can recall his first rollover, and chronicle either the basic details - how many victims, where the car rolled - or the graphic version, with the brain matter on the road.

"If you could bring people to see a crash of a one-car rollover, if they could see such a waste it is," Jordan said.

They would see personal effects of the drivers and passengers peppered along the roadway. They'd find CDs scattered along the asphalt, a cooler spilling down a ditch. The engine and maybe the transmission would be catapulted from the disemboweled automobile at speeds upwards of 45 miles an hour. Sometimes, the people once inside would be too.

And if they followed the patrol around for a year, they would see it far too often.

The one-car rollover is an accident born on long, lonely roads, an accident made worse by unbuckled drivers.

As the statistics show, it's Wyoming's kind of wreck.

Ninety-one people in the state died as a result of rollovers in 2006, or one every four days of the year. According to patrol numbers, 47 percent of all people who died in Wyoming car accidents, died in rollovers.

That percentage is sure to keep the Equality State toward the top of the national rankings in that category, where Wyoming's been for years.

2006 marked the 23rd straight year the one-car rollover topped Wyoming's fatal accident rankings, and all signs point to a continued impact on Wyoming lives.

Every night, in his cubicle at the Casper call center where he works, Shawn Manning looks at taped-up pictures of a mangled red 1988 Ford Escort.

He peeled them from a scrapbook that still holds his bracelets from the two summer months he spent in the hospital in 1999.

It also contains four obituaries and a newspaper article about an accident that took four promising lives, nearly five.

"I look at it all the time," said Manning, the lone survivor of a high-speed rollover that killed four teenage boys. "Don't want to forget, either."

They listened to hardcore metal - Slipknot or something, not really Manning's thing - as the Ford sped down Casper Mountain early in the morning on July 25, 1999. Around Lookout Point, the brakes failed.

The driver, who Manning said had his license for only two weeks, tried slamming them.

No luck.

He tried to downshift.

Nothing.

He applied the emergency brake.

No help.

Manning remembers the smell of the burning tires.

Jordan uncaps an orange dry-erase marker and outlines a portion of a two-lane highway, let's say I-25, along a board in the patrol's Casper office.

He picks up a red marker, and draws a box with a little triangle for a nose, a car heading straight along the road. Then he prescribes a condition for the driver - let's say he's asleep, Jordan says. Or he could be drunk or fiddling with a crying baby in the back seat or spilling coffee on his pants. ]Any distraction can set off the chain.

Driver behavior plays the most prominent role in most rollovers, according to safercar.gov.

Jordan draws dash marks veering off to the right side of the road.

At this point, the virtual driver has driven straight into a panic, and whips the steering wheel to the left while mashing down on the brakes.

On the fatality reports the highway patrol releases about every fourth day, that's called "overcorrecting."

The dash marks briefly leave the highway, but that's enough time for the tires to catch in the dirt on the side of the road, begin to lose traction and slide sideways. They veer back onto I-25, and the speed of the vehicle shoots it into the passing lane. Jordan dots the board quicker.

"Holy crap!" Jordan says. "Now he really corrects it!"

At this point, the driver's no longer in control of the dash marks. He tries to steer the car again back into the right lane, but the vehicle's already sliding on two wheels, which will soon collapse under the weight of the rest of the vehicle.

G-forces have pulled the driver away from the steering wheel anyway. An unbuckled driver, even a strong one, has probably been thrust into the passenger seat by this time, Jordan says.

"You can almost draw the diagram on an accident report the same each time," he says. "Any trooper could draw these from memory."

To avoid overcorrecting, Jordan says, drivers need to battle instinct and perhaps outdated driver's ed teaching that both say to stay on the road.

"So what if you hit a delineator post?" Jordan says. "So what if you hit a wood post?"

To avoid flipping after realizing you've veered off the road, you should gradually steer back on track, lightly pushing down on the brakes as you make your way back, Jordan says.

But if you're going to roll, hopefully you buckled up.

That last sharp curve down Casper Mountain, the one you're supposed to take at 15 miles an hour, Manning said the Escort rounded at about 45 or 50.

The car hit the final descent down Casper Mountain Road going at least 100 mph, Manning said. The car crossed into the southbound lane, went off the road and hit an access road approach.

The driver and four passengers - all boys - screamed and panicked until the car went airborne, but they didn't put seat belts on. They probably had time to, Manning said, but everything happened so incredibly fast.

The car went silent during what the patrol estimated as a 135-foot flight. Manning, sitting back right, said he passed out from fear mid-flight before the landing battered every part of the Escort and ejected all five.

At about 6 a.m., Manning said he woke up in a field and didn't know why. He looked down and saw a metal rod protruding from his stomach. Shock allowed him to pull it out of his punctured spleen.

He walked toward what used to be a car. Before he passed out again, he saw things he'll remember forever but would rather not repeat.

Early morning on Feb. 6, two cars on I-25 near Douglas slid on black ice and rolled within a tenth of a mile of each other, according to Lt. Nate Hughes.

The people in one car were belted in, and walked away fine. The women in the other one weren't. Both were ejected, the driver killed, the passenger hospitalized.

A human body isn't meant to collide with anything at 40-plus miles an hour, Jordan said. Wearing a seat belt, Jordan said, is the best way to make sure you're not thrown out during a rollover.

"You don't land on a pillow," said Sgt. Duane Ellis, Safety Education Cordinator for the Wyoming Highway Patrol.

Ellis rolled once, while a senior at Lander Valley High School. Ellis let his focus go while driving in Arapahoe one night when he realized his Ford Bronco was heading off the road. His instincts told him to get the truck back on the road ASAP, and, like those of Jordan's ill-fated driver, they were wrong.

Ellis' Bronco tumbled down an embankment, but landed on its wheels. He unbuckled his seat belt, got out of the truck and walked away shaken, with a cut on his head, but otherwise fine.

Jordan rolled once too, while riding in a patrol car. Dispatch told the driver to respond to a wreck in the middle of the road at Milepost 12 on I-80 near Rawlins. They sped toward it only to discover the collision was really at Milepost 5. They swerved out of the way at about 30 mph, Jordan said, but still the car toppled over one and a half times. Both were buckled in and both left the scene unscathed.

Of the 91 people who died in rollovers last year, 82 of them weren't restrained, according to the patrol. Jordan said he's seen so many rollovers where the driver lived because the seat belt kept him safely in his seat.

On Jan. 18th, SuperManning wrote on the Star-Tribune Web site:

"I was in a car accident that killed 4 of my friends in 1999 on Casper Mt. Rd. we rolled end over end and everyone was thrown out of the car and I was the only one who survived. I was not wearing my seatbelt, in fact they said if I had been I would have died too. I do not wear my seatbelt but that is my choice. I know I need to but something always tells me not to wear it. Maybe it was the Brain Injury I sustained in that wreck. LOL. I don't recommend not wearing one tho. They are PROVEN to reduce the risk of Fatality, just not in my case."

A study conducted by the Wyoming Department of Transportation's Highway Safety Office last June showed that fewer than six in 10 drivers and front seat passengers buckled up in 23,000 vehicles observed in nine Wyoming counties, despite the fact that state law requires people to buckle up.

The study put Wyoming well below the national average of more than 8 in 10 buckling up.

"The people of Wyoming and compliance with seat belts is terrible," Jordan said.

He and others have called for the Legislature to pass a primary enforcement law, which would allow authorities to pull people over if they aren't wearing seat belts, rather than allowing troopers to ticket the unbuckled only after they've been stopped for other offenses.

An effort to pass the law failed in the current Legislative session.

As it is, not enough people are obeying the law, Jordan said.

Some officials referred to the reasoning behind the resistance as a frontier trait. Jordan called it stubbornness.

"It's frustrating," Ellis said. "It's such a simple thing to do."

But it's not foolproof, either. The first rollover Ellis responded to when he became a trooper involved an intoxicated woman who flipped her car several times on Hwy. 211, north of Cheyenne. Though she was wearing a seat belt, she died after her head went through the sunroof.

It's a violent wreck, Jordan said. It leaves victims unrecognizable, and families reeling.

"I have never worked a crash where at least 20 people weren't affected by the death of that person," Jordan said.

Even those not hurt during a rollover have come away with a sense of its danger.

Denise Rampola, who is the Wing Family Support Services Coordinator with the Wyoming Air National Guard, said her rollover experience gave her something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Recently, Ellis presented Rampola a Seat Belt Survivor Award after she rolled her 2003 GMC Yukon on a dirt road near her east Cheyenne home. She and her three boys, ages 8, 10 and 12, were all buckled in and unharmed. She stood back from the crumpled SUV that afternoon, and surveyed the scene.

"It is such a strong and powerful thing to step back take a look at what you were inside of," she said. "I could have lost all of my kids, or one of my children or all of us."

Manning, 23, posted his comment to a story about Wyoming's low level of seat belt use. On the Star-Tribune's Web site, a verbal debate had begun after some commenters wrote that they weren't buckling up because they felt encroached upon by the government.

Manning didn't see it that way.

"It's probably just laziness," he said. "It has nothing to do with the wreck."

He said he wears his belt when driving in the snow, or on long trips, neither of which he cares for.

Months after the wreck, Manning thought he was a video game.

"Put a quarter in me or I'm gonna die," he'd yell at his mom.

That was the delirium, which he said he suffered after he awoke from about a nine-week coma. There's a one-page chart that ranks those and other severe brain damage conditions in his scrapbook.

But he didn't break one bone after the Escort ejected him. His nurse at Wyoming Medical Center gave him a nickname: Super Manning. He later had a barbed-wire-wrapped Superman logo tattooed on his chest.

Manning went up to Lookout Point two weeks ago at about 2 a.m., just to think about his life, his wife, his son and two stepchildren, his jobs and his music and his thoughts, and the wreck.

"I'm obviously not invincible," he said later. "No car's made to roll over."