MONROE COUNTY, Ga. — Neighbors around the Riverwalk subdivision look out on the pond in their backyards, keeping an eye out for the brownish water to take on a new color.
"It looked normal, like it normally did, so we felt like, 'Well, maybe it hadn't gotten here,' but we weren't really sure how much it was," says Scott McComb.
The creek leads over to I-75 South, right by the Johnsonville Road exit, where a semi-truck carrying paint turned over.
"I would say several hundred gallons has spilled off of that -- I don't know how much he was carrying and I don't know how many popped open," says Monroe County EMA director, Matthew Perry.
The Monroe County Sheriff's Office says a car traveling down the highway during several inches of heavy rainfall, hit a puddle, and hydroplaned.
It caused the semi-truck to veer off the road and crash in the woods. No one was injured.
Perry, says some of the buckets of paint inside the truck leaked into Little Towaliga Creek.
"We dammed everything up and stopped it. Some got into the waterway,"
says Perry.
Monroe County emergency management teams worked with several agencies to clean up the puddles of white paint.
Georgia Environmental Protection Department says the paint was "nontoxic" and wouldn't hurt anyone.
"Most of it was gone, and there was just so much water coming through there it just diluted it all," says Perry.
Clean up crews worked for hours to gather up the paint and will continue scraping up what's left.
"Now, we are literally watching the paint dry," says Perry.
People in Riverwalk neighborhood see no signs of white coloring in the water, but keep their eyes peeled.
"Yeah, we will keep on watching," says McComb.
Perry says a cleanup company will come out and dig up all the remaining paint, and the state will continue to monitor the water around the spill area.