Chattooga County Sheriff Mark Schrader is reminding area residents to be extra vigilant during the Christmas and New Year’s Holiday Travel periods.

Each year the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety and the Georgia State Patrol urge holiday commuters to buckle-up, put the cell phone down and not to drink and drive.  Sheriff Schrader says that his deputies will be patrolling looking for the same things and reminds residents that traffic will be picking up in our area over the next week.

Sheriff Schrader said, “This is the time of the year that traffic picks up.  We don’t have an interstate in Chattooga County, but what we’ve noticed over the past several years is that our Highway 27 and Highway 48 corridor between Interstate 59 in Alabama and Interstate 75 in Georgia, traffic really picks up during the holidays.”

The sheriff said there is a lot of traffic traveling from the Birmingham and Huntsville areas heading to Atlanta that use Chattooga County as a “cut-through”.