By Shavonne Potts
spotts@salisburypost.com
Why was the chicken across the road?
Nobody knows ó or if they do, they’re not telling ó but it sure did cause a mess Monday.
That chicken, and turkey, caused Linda Honeycutt to miss work. Driving to her job at Rowan Cabarrus Community College around 9 a.m. Monday, Honeycutt noticed something lying on Jake Alexander Boulevard near the Interstate 85 overpass.
She couldn’t avoid it and ran over it.
“It was a crunch, crunch, crunch,” she said, describing the sound.
Honeycutt didn’t know what she’d driven over until she was able to slow down and look in her rearview mirror.
She saw a mess of chicken and turkey parts, bones and all.
When Honeycutt arrived at work, the stench overtook her and a co-worker, who had avoided the fowl fiasco just 15 minutes earlier.
“It was terrible,” Honeycutt said.
She drove her car to Sam’s Car Wash on East Innes Street. Workers there washed the car, including the undercarriage, twice. The smell did not fade.
Car wash employees told Honeycutt she was the third customer who’d driven through the poultry parts.
As a last resort, she took the car home and asked her son for help. Craig Honeycutt went to his mother’s house on his day off and pressure-washed the car. He spent nearly two hours cleaning pieces of chicken and turkey from underneath the vehicle, trying to get rid of the odor.
“I missed a whole day of work,” Linda Honeycutt said.
No one knows how the animal waste got on the road. No truck or vehicle driver admitted to losing a load.
John Thomason, a transportation supervisor with the N.C. Department of Transportation, said the mess was already there when he and his crew arrived after getting a call from the county’s 911 telecommunications center.
“We shoveled it, cleaned it up and put it in trash bags,” Thomason said.
Salisbury Police officers redirected traffic while the crew collected the chicken and turkey waste.