Twice in three years, a curve in Old Highway 5 at the south side of Nelson has claimed the life of a Pickens County motorist. The curve begins near the Kennesaw Avenue intersection with the old highway and continues south from there about 500 feet.
Two Saturdays ago, Shane Hollifield (age 37) died when his northbound Honda Civic left the highway in this curve and struck a tree. In October 2006, Deborah Padgett (age 35) lost control of her Jeep Cherokee as it slipped off the same curve going south.
The locations where the two vehicles left the road in the curve are within about 330 feet of each other, though the vehicles travelled in opposite directions.
The road is elevated on a fill at that place. The curve is not significantly banked. The earthen shoulder at the side of the pavement is hardly wider than a car. And from the shoulder's edge, the drop is almost straight down.
Where Padgett's car left the curve, the drop descends 40 feet from the shoulder's edge to the bottom of a ravine that parallels the road. Large trees and heavy undergrowth effectively disguise the situation, but the hazard is real. The curve lips a deep crater with a sheer drop from the edge of the narrow road shoulder.
In the morning wreck of Padgett's Cherokee, the car landed upside down at the crater bottom. Apparently unconscious, Padgett asphyxiated against the pressure of her seatbelt harness.
But the car, obscured by brush, remained undetected for hours––hours that Padgett's two small sons hung alive but upside down, strapped in their car seats. That afternoon, two pest-control workers in a passing truck noticed the overturned car down below. They alerted the authorities, then participated in the boys' rescue.
The curve at Nelson is a hazardous spot. And it's a fair guess a guardrail could save lives there. Because the place is just over the county line into Cherokee County, we contacted Engineer Geoff Morton, director of Public Works for Cherokee County to ask about a guardrail for the place.
Morton was already in motion on the project. He said Cherokee's assistant county engineer would be taking a look at the curve early this week to see if a guardrail could help the problem. Morton said he was still trying to determine if the Georgia Department of Transportation, the City of Nelson, or Cherokee County owns the responsibility of maintaining that stretch of road.
We're not engineers, but it doesn't seem that tagging the responsibility for a public road would take very long to accomplish. Maybe it won't take long.
Maybe by the time you read this, Morton will know something on the guardrail. He will have his engineer's report in hand, saying if a guardrail might serve at that spot, and maybe he will know whose job it would be to build a guardrail there.
"Call back midweek," Morton said. "I should know something then."
We appreciate Cherokee County's prompt attention to this case. And we assure our readers we'll be ringing the phone. |
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