South Carolina’s seat-belt law gets tougher today, and Pee Dee residents need to know that authorities will be on the lookout for anyone who isn’t buckled up, officials say.

Drivers “need to take into account that this is a primary violation and that our officers are going to be on a heightened awareness and that they will be actively citing drivers who are in violation of the law,” Florence Police Inspector Allen Heidler said Thursday.

The fact that the state is turning to a primary seat-belt law means an officer can now stop a vehicle if a driver or occupant of any age isn’t buckled up or if a child isn’t in the required child-restraint system.

Under the previous law, if a driver or passenger is older than 18 and not wearing a seat belt, the driver can be cited only if he or she had already been stopped for another reason. That seat-belt law allows an officer to stop a driver if any person younger than 17 is not wearing a seat belt or not in a child-restraint system while in a vehicle.

Under the new law, anyone not buckled up could face a $25 fine. An officer cannot give a fine of more than $50 in case of two or more violations during a traffic stop.

But officials say the new law isn’t a scheme to give tickets and make money.

“The whole idea behind the seat-belt law is to save lives,” Heidler said last week. “It’s not an opportunity for law enforcement to stop people” and write citations.

An officer cannot give a citation to someone not wearing his seat belt when stopping at a public-safety checkpoint.

The officer could cite a person, however, for refusing an officer’s command to buckle up, Heidler said last week.

As of Wednesday, 59 more people had died on South Carolina roads than during all of 2004, according to statistics from the South Carolina Department of Public Safety.

“So many times we see a minor to moderate crash end up in a fatality just for failure to use that seat belt,” S.C. Highway Patrol Senior Trooper Sonny Collins said last week.

More than half of the 1,019 people killed as of Wednesday on South Carolina roads weren’t buckled up during the fatal crashes, according to the department’s statistics.

Nearly 80 percent of those 1,019 people had access to a seat belt, the department’s statistics show. That percentage includes passengers inside cars, trucks and vans, while the total number of fatalities also includes pedestrians, cyclists and others.