Raw meat – 40,000 pounds of chicken – spills out on Georgia Interstate after crash

Georgia drivers had a new culprit behind their afternoon traffic stop: 40,000 pounds of raw, frozen chickens.

The raw chicken covered a portion of I-285 in Sandy Springs, which is about 15 miles north of Atlanta, after a crash around 6:00 pm on Wednesday, September 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 spokesman Matthew McGinnis told McClatchy News. The accident caused a pileup of seven cars – and 40,000 pounds of chicken went over the road.

Sandy Springs police posted a traffic alert on Twitter Wednesday, now renamed X, to warn drivers about “an overturned tractor trailer with a fuel spill.”

It took three hours of “cleaning up frozen chickens and the wreckage itself,” McGinnis said. The cleanup was long because there was “a lot of debris scattered,” he said.

At 9:25 p.m., Sandy Springs police posted on X that “ALL lanes of I-285” had reopened.

There were some injuries in Wednesday’s crash, McGinnis said, but none were life-threatening.

This is not the only traffic accident in Georgia that will happen this summer.

In early July, about 30 miles northwest of where the Sept. 13 crash occurred, a truck carrying chicken intestines crashed into a road in Cherokee County, as shown in a photo from the county sheriff’s office’s Facebook post. Just a few weeks earlier, a similar incident happened on another road in the province.