9-year-old boy killed in car wreck on I-95 in the Lowcountry’s “coffin corridor”

A 9-year-old boy was killed Thursday in a car wreck in what’s known as the “coffin corridor” on Interstate 95 in Jasper County, when the vehicle he was in struck a tree.

Ephraim Burton suffered a brain injury and skull fracture, said Jasper County Coroner Martin Sauls. He was transported to the hospital but died from severe trauma at 9:10 p.m.

His mother, Andera Hardy, was driving the 2012 Jeep Liberty in rainy conditions when the wreck occurred, said Matt Southern of the S.C. Highway Patrol. The car, traveling south on I-95, ran off the right side of the road around mile marker 14 and hit a tree — the same spot where there was another crash one day before.

Hardy and a second child sitting in the back seat were sent to Savannah Memorial Hospital with minor injuries, Southern said. Only one car was involved in the crash.

Hardy, a resident of Hinesville, Georgia, was wearing a seat belt, as were the two children in the back seat.

The death is the most recent in a long line of tree-related deaths along the 35-mile stretch of I-95 that runs through Jasper County. A 2015 investigation by The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette found that more motorists were dying in tree-related wrecks along the main artery to Hilton Head Island than anywhere else along I-95 in South Carolina.

From 2010 to early 2015, the stretch of interstate was the scene of 22 deaths. Approximately 75 percent of those deaths were due to collisions with trees, according to the newspapers’ analysis. The S.C. Highway Patrol did not immediately respond Friday to the newspapers’ request for updated fatality data for that stretch of I-95.

In many areas, trees are within 15 or 20 feet of the interstate, some places even less. That does not meet the state’s highway safety guidelines, which recommend a clear zone of at least 30 feet between the road’s edge and the nearest “roadside” hazard, according to the papers’ investigation.

Trees too close to the busy interstate give errant drivers less time to recover. When a speeding car leaves the road and strikes a tree, the driver often loses, the analysis found.

Last year, the S.C. Department of Transportation began a $9 million safety improvement project along the stretch of road, removing trees and correcting shoulders to make the road safer.

The project is about 70 percent completed, said Kevin Turner, district construction engineer with the the S.C. DOT. Tree removal should be finished in October, Turner said, while the entire project will be completed in November.

This story was originally published July 27, 2018 at 4:50 PM.