For the second time in two days, a crash shut down Alabama Highway 160 last weekend - and renewed a question west Blount residents have been asking for nearly two decades: what is the state going to do about Highway 160?
Two crashes, two days
Friday, Sept. 25: Traffic on Highway 160 came to a standstill, backing up past Mountain Woods Lake Road, after what dispatch described as a two-vehicle T-bone collision near the 3 mile marker, in the area of Chaly Springs Road and Stan Holton Drive, according to local highway-safety advocate Jerome Colley. Drivers were turning around after sitting without moving. Injuries were not known at the time of dispatch, and ALEA has not released information on the crash.
Saturday, Sept. 26: A two-vehicle crash at about 7:50 p.m. closed all lanes near the 11 mile marker east of Hayden, according to Trooper Jaylon James of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, as reported by The Trussville Tribune. ALEA said the road would be blocked “for an undetermined amount of time” while its Highway Patrol Division investigated. As of Tuesday, ALEA had not released information on injuries or the vehicles involved.
Colley also posted photos of an overturned car that had gone down an embankment and into a creek beside Highway 160, describing it as “the second accident that I’m aware of since Friday.”
“Seventeen years”
Colley has pushed for improvements to the highway since his wife, Kimmi, was killed on it in 2009 - a fight profiled by CBS 42’s Charlize Ramos on the 17th anniversary of the crash earlier this month. After this weekend’s crashes, he renewed his call on the governor, U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt, state Sen. Shay Shelnutt, state Rep. David Standridge, County Commissioner Allen Armstrong and ALDOT.
“Since 2009, the people who live along Highway 160 and those who travel it daily have waited for meaningful progress on promised improvements,” Colley wrote. “Meanwhile, Alabama continues investing hundreds of millions of dollars in major highway construction elsewhere. This is not opposition to progress. This is a demand that progress include the people of western Blount County.”
“I am tired of watching this happen. I am tired of wondering whose family will receive the next telephone call,” he wrote Saturday. “We should not have to wait for another fatality before demanding answers about the safety of this corridor.”
He is asking for a comprehensive safety assessment of the highway, public release of previous studies and proposed improvements, an explanation of what projects have been funded, and a published timeline for completion. “We do not need another press release,” he wrote. “We need accountability, funding, construction, and a completed highway.”
The road
State Route 160 runs 18.4 miles from U.S. 31 near Smoke Rise and I-65’s Exit 284, through Hayden, Mount Olive, Sugar Creek and Nectar, to U.S. 231 in Cleveland. It is the only state highway that lies entirely within Blount County, and until 1971 it was a county road. Most of it remains a two-lane road with narrow or no shoulders, hills that limit sight distance, and steep drop-offs along several stretches - while carrying traffic for a fast-growing corridor and the Hayden school campuses.
A history of loss
Highway 160’s reputation was built crash by crash. Among those reported over the years:
- November 2007 - Three Hayden High School cheerleaders were killed and four other students injured when their car left the road and went down an embankment about 10 miles east of Hayden. The crash led residents to form the advocacy group Highway 160 Promise.
- September 2009 - Kimberly “Kimmi” Colley was hit head-on when, her husband says, another driver hit water pooled on the road after 2 to 4 inches of rain fell that morning. She died Oct. 2.
- December 2009 - A 19-year-old college student was killed in a three-vehicle crash just west of Cleveland, between Dairy Drive and Nectar Circle. A 4-year-old in her car was injured.
- November 2015 - Three separate wrecks happened on the highway in a single day, including one that killed a motorcyclist near Mountain Woods Lake Road, where drivers pulling out can’t see traffic coming over the hill.
- April 2023 - A driver was killed after his car hit the rear of a school bus about four miles east of Hayden. No one on the bus was seriously hurt.
- August 2023 - A sheriff’s sergeant was hospitalized after a head-on crash at Highway 160 and County Road 9. Three days later, a section of the highway itself collapsed between Mountain Woods Lake Road and Stan Holton Drive - the same stretch where Friday’s crash occurred.
- May 2024 - A driver was killed when his car ran off the road, overturned and hit a guardrail near the 16 mile marker outside Cleveland.
- June 2024 - A driver was killed in a head-on crash near the 6 mile marker, about a mile east of Hayden.
Highway 160 Promise organizers have said the road claimed 20 lives in 25 years. No comprehensive crash count for the full corridor has been made public.
Promises made
In April 2006, then-Gov. Bob Riley promised to fast-track work to make the highway safe, including widening it to four lanes. After the 2009 crashes, ALDOT announced plans to widen about 5.5 miles from I-65 past the Hayden schools, and state troopers ran a two-week enforcement push that October, writing 72 citations.
In October 2010, ALDOT showed residents plans for a four-lane highway with a center turn lane from I-65 to past the elementary school. About 30 homeowners would have been displaced. Right-of-way purchases were expected to begin in early 2011, with construction to follow.
“It is a step in the right direction,” Colley told WBRC at the time. “3 1/2 years too late for me.”
That widening was never built. By 2015, residents told WBRC that “almost nothing has been done.”
What has been done
In a statement to CBS 42 earlier this month, ALDOT said it has built turn lanes in front of the school campuses, installed guardrails along steep shoulders and resurfaced a 10-mile section of the highway.
“They promised us that they would add four lanes, five miles on Highway 160 beginning there at Exit 284,” Colley told CBS 42. “Well, since then, there’s been little done. Matter of fact, where my wife’s accident occurred, they haven’t even put in a guardrail.”
The department’s biggest investment on 160 is the $8.6 million triple roundabout at Exit 284, which opened in summer 2025. ALDOT says that stretch saw 56 crashes, eight with injuries, in the three years before construction, and that crashes per month fell by half after it opened, with no injuries. The project won a regional America’s Transportation Award in August.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that without the roundabouts there, we would have already had a fatality,” Hayden Police Chief James Chapman told ALDOT.
But the roundabouts cover less than half a mile of an 18-mile road.
What’s planned
Very little, on paper. ALDOT’s current Statewide Transportation Improvement Program for Blount County, which lists funded projects through fiscal 2027, includes work on I-65, U.S. 31, U.S. 231, Alabama 79 and U.S. 278 - but no projects on Highway 160.
“ALDOT remains committed to exploring other fundable safety upgrades to SR-160 in the future,” the department said in its statement this month.
Local officials say that time is coming. “I know we’re growing up here. There’s more businesses now than there was 25 years ago, for sure,” Blount County Commissioner Allen Armstrong told CBS 42. “And at some point, ALDOT is going to have to make a decision to do something besides just leave it at the two-lane road, and I’m willing to do whatever we can ask for.” State Rep. David Standridge also said he will continue advocating for improvements to the highway.
For Colley, it’s personal. “I live there and every time I pass it, I think about that one day in my life that, you know, I can’t get around it,” he said. “They need to widen it because there’s nowhere to pass.”
westblount.com will update this story as ALEA releases more information about this weekend’s crashes.
Sources: Alabama Law Enforcement Agency via The Trussville Tribune; Jerome Colley; ALDOT; CBS 42 (Charlize Ramos); WBRC; ABC 33/40; WVTM 13; Fox News; 1819 News; The Blount Countian; ALDOT STIP (Blount County, FY2024-2027).