A Milledgeville man was taken by ambulance to a hospital in serious condition Friday morning after his pickup crashed head-on into a piece of road construction equipment. Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills said the condition of the driver, 21-year-old Omar Palacos-Balderas, was unknown Tuesday at the newspaper’s press time.
Sometime during the night, Balderas was driving a blue 2008 Ford F150 north on State Route 24/U.S. Hwy. 441 near Bethel Church Road, where construction is underway to widen the road into a fourlane highway. Balderas’ pickup left the roadway and hit some construction barrels lining the right side of the road. Apparently in an attempt to avoid the barrels, Balderas swerved to the left, which caused his truck to go into the construction zone and hit head-on into the dozer blade of a parked Caterpillar 815F soil compactor. According to an accident report by Putnam County Deputy Sheriff Nicholas Fazio, the impact forced the F150 to deflect off the construction equipment and spin around and face the opposite direction before coming to a rest.
“The road was wet due to heavy rain the previous evening and construction barrels were on both sides of the road due to the construction,” Fazio noted in his report.
The road construction crew called 911 and reported the crash shortly after 7 a.m. Friday, but the time of the crash is unknown, according to the report.
“The driver was unresponsive and could not give me a statement,” Fazio wrote in his report. “I was unable to determine an estimated crash time; however, the [F150] was captured by a Flock camera traveling north on State Route 24 at 2:25 a.m.”
The crash remains under investigation, Sills said.