Raw meat — 40,000 pounds of chicken — spills out onto Georgia interstate after crash
Georgia drivers had a new culprit behind their afternoon traffic jam: 40,000 pounds of raw, frozen chickens.
The raw chicken covered a section of I-285 in Sandy Springs, which is around 15 miles north of Atlanta, following a crash at around 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 13.
Photos and videos from local news outlets showed the mess.
A tractor-trailer carrying the raw meat hit a car on the interstate, Sandy Springs Police Department spokesperson Matthew McGinnis told McClatchy News. The crash caused a seven-car pileup — and 40,000 pounds of chicken to spill out across the road.
Sandy Springs police posted a traffic alert Wednesday on Twitter, now rebranded to X, to warn drivers about “an overturned tractor trailer with a fuel spill.”
I-285 EB at Northside Dr is shut down due to a 7 car wreck involving an overturned tractor trailer with a fuel spill. Find an alternate route. pic.twitter.com/YawUml6Zxq
— Sandy Springs Police (@SandySprings_PD) September 13, 2023
It took three hours of “cleaning up frozen chickens and the wreck itself,” McGinnis said. The cleanup was lengthy because there was “lots of debris scattered,” he said.
At 9:25 p.m., Sandy Springs police posted on X that “ALL lanes of I-285” were reopened.
There were some injuries in Wednesday’s crash, McGinnis said, but none were life-threatening.
This isn’t Georgia’s only chicken-related traffic accident to happen this summer.
In early July, around 30 miles northwest of where the Sept. 13 crash occurred, a truck carrying chicken guts spilled into a road in Cherokee County, as seen in a photo from the county sheriff’s office’s Facebook post. Just a few weeks earlier, a similar incident happened on a different road in the county.
