Camper wreck closes 27 South

Published 3:08 pm Wednesday, August 1, 2012

A camper trailer being towed by an RV flipped over on U.S. 27 South Wednesday, creating a road hazard.

No one was injured in the single-vehicle, single-occupant accident, according to Georgia State Trooper First Class Eric Brinson. However, the camper was destroyed and most of its contents were ruined in the aftermath.

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The accident happened at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday morning atop a bridge that crosses over Attapulgus Creek, about two miles south of Attapulgus on 27 South, Trooper Brinson said.

A Florida man was driving an older-model RV that was towing a camper trailer behind it, heading south. As he went down a hill and onto the bridge, the camper “fish-tailed”—its rear end skidding back and forth—before flipping over onto its side, TFC Brinson said. The camper top slid into a ditch, while the rest of it extended across both of the highway’s southbound lanes.

The driver was able to stop his RV and was uninjured in the accident. No one was in the camper at the time of the accident—a woman and her son who had been living in it were following behind in another vehicle and were also uninjured, Brinson said.

“The RV’s driver was helping the camper’s residents move from Indiana down to Florida,” Brinson said.

Because the camper was old and had previously been damaged by a storm, it wasn’t possible to get it sitting upright on the road again without it falling apart, said Bryan Hall, who operates a tow truck for Jimmy’s Auto Sales in Bainbridge.

The state trooper allowed the camper’s residents to gather a few sentimental items from the camper before it was removed from the roadway. A front-end loader was brought in to lift pieces of the camper off of the highway. The pieces of the camper and its contents were then deposited into a dumpster mounted on top of a semi-trailer truck.

The State Patrol, the Sheriff’s Office and the Georgia Department of Transportation worked to set up a detour around the accident site, as the roadway wasn’t fully cleared until almost noon.