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June 4, 2009

Wrecks raise concern about Rocky Face intersection

Mark Millican

A pregnant woman due to deliver her child today was involved in the second of back-to-back wrecks on Thursday at a tricky intersection in Rocky Face but was not injured, a Whitfield 911 operator said. The woman wanted to go to the hospital to be evaluated.

Traffic was tied up for more than an hour on busy U.S. Highway 41 as a result of the wrecks.

Two cars collided at the juncture of Old LaFayette Road and U.S. 41 just before 5:45 p.m., sending two people to Hamilton Medical Center by ambulance, said the 911 operator. An eyewitness, Jo Lyn Koerner of That Special Something floral shop, described the scene.

“They had the cars (from the first wreck) on the wrecker, and the trooper was writing it up, then ‘bam, bam, bam!’ here came three more piling up,” she said.

Koerner said she knows the pregnant woman and her husband and asked her if she was OK.

“She said she was all right,” Koerner said. “She looked fine and she was smiling. They were rear-ended by a pickup, and they had their little girl — she’s maybe 4 or 5 — with them.”

She said she saw no one in the second wreck taken from the scene by ambulance.

“I’m hearing wrecks here all the time,” she said. “There needs to be a turn signal at that light (the only one in Rocky Face), and they need to put a cop down there at the bridge (over Mill Creek) to slow people down. People driving north are just flying past the (Georgia) state patrol post, and if you’re driving south it’s hard to judge how fast they’re coming at you.

“Sometimes you can’t even get out of the Kangaroo (convenience store). It’s beyond belief how many people are getting hurt and killed here.”

State patrol investigators were still on the scene just before dark Thursday.

A Rocky Face couple died in a wreck at the intersection in mid-January, and their 5-year-old granddaughter died later of injuries from the two-vehicle collision.

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