Williamstown ? John Rodecap Jr.’s first call as a Jefferson County firefighter in 1986 was to a crash on U.S. Highway 24. Five people were killed.

Now nearly 20 years later, Rodecap Jr. has been called to more wrecks along the highway than he cares to remember. And he doesn’t mince words about his opinion of the two-lane road.

“It’s a battle zone,” said Rodecap Jr., assistant chief of the Jefferson County Rural Township Fire Department.

The body count keeps going up.

In the last two weeks of November, two people were killed in separate crashes along U.S. Highway 24-59 east of Williamstown. Two others were injured in a third collision.

Inside their Williamstown fire station, Jefferson County Rural firefighters have a wall map charting the accidents they have responded to since 1985. There are a multitude of colored pins sticking out of the map — and a good many are scattered in clumps along U.S. 24-59.

Rodecap Jr. estimated that of about 300 yellow pins in the map, as many as 180 of them are along the highway. According to the map, 25 of those have been fatal crashes.

“It’s not when it is going to happen, but how bad it is going to be,” he said of the accident calls.

Rodecap’s father, John Rodecap Sr., agreed. He has been the only chief of the department since it was formed almost 20 years ago. One of the troubled areas, he said, is along a series of curves about 4 miles northwest of Midland Junction and about 2 miles west of the Jefferson County line.

John Rodecap Sr., fire chief for the Jefferson County Rural Township Fire Department, knows all about the dangers of U.S. Highway 24 through his district. Since 1986, when his department began identifying accidents on a county map with pins, Rodecap and the fire department have responded to 180 vehicle accidents and 25 fatalities on the highway.

“People go too fast,” Rodecap Sr. said. “I don’t think they (curves) are banked right, either.”

Burton and Shirley Perdue have lived near the curves in the highway for more than 20 years. They know how difficult the curves can be for motorists to negotiate.

“We’ve seen them go off the road into the field,” Shirley Perdue said.

Crashes along the curves used to be even more numerous because the rise of the land made it difficult to see what was ahead, she said, but it got better when some of the land was leveled a few years ago.

State records show there have been seven fatal accidents along the 10-mile stretch between Lawrence and Williamstown.

The Williamstown-U.S. 59 intersection is where many of the accidents have occurred through the years. The U.S. 24 intersection with Ferguson Road at Perry also has been a trouble spot, according to the Rodecaps.

But the highway isn’t always to blame for the accidents, they said.

“It’s people not paying attention,” Rodecap Jr. said. “They get complacent. If you let your guard down, you are in jeopardy.”

There have been improvements to the highway near Williamstown. It has shoulders, and the pavement has been resurfaced. Despite that, firefighters have seen no decline in the number of accidents along the route they work. On bad-weather days, some of the department’s 30 volunteer firefighters stay at the station just to be ready to respond, they said.

“My guys have gotten to be experts at extraction,” Rodecap Jr. said. “They’ve gotten quite good at getting into vehicles because they’ve had a lot of practice.”

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