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Atlanta Gambled With Winter Storm and Lost
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kim Severson reports at the NYT that by keeping schools and government offices open, and by not requiring tractor-trailers to use chains or stay out of the city's core, metropolitan Atlanta gambled and lost. "We don't want to be accused of crying wolf," said Gov. Nathan Deal, who pointed out that the storm had been forecast to just brush the south side of the city. If the city had been closed and the storm had been as light as some forecasters had told him it was going to be, he said, money would have been lost, and people would have complained. Tuesday's snowfall, that brought only 2-3 inches of snow to most of the Atlanta metro area, and the hundreds of thousands of motorists who flooded the metropolitan area's roadways as the storm moved in — created travel nightmares for commuters, truckers, students and their families. Some commuters were stuck in their vehicles up to 18 hours after they first hit the roads. Others abandoned their cars in or beside the road. Hundreds of students spent the night at school. Some surrounding cities, including Hiram, Woodstock, Sandy Springs and Acworth, opened emergency shelters for stranded motorists. "It's an easy joke made by Northerners," wrote Joe Sterling and Sarah Aarthun. "A dusting of snow shuts down an entire city and hapless drivers white-knuckle their way through a handful of flurries." Further North streets are salted well in advance of a coming storm but Atlanta doesn't have the capacity for that kind of treatment. "We simply have never purchased the amount of equipment necessary," said meteorologist Chad Myers adding Atlanta had plenty of warning. "Why would you in a city that gets one snow event every three years? Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?""
You should try over here in the UK where the mere suggestion of snow seems to shut everything down
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Let's just say that the city has a long history of not dealing with snow well, and leave it at that.
...about this topic. They do cite that the National Weather Service had only issued a winter weather advisory for the area, not a watch or a warning, until 3:30am the day that all hell broke loose. Apparently local meteorologists disagreed with the NWS, but without their formal statements I'm not exactly surprised that public officials and employees didn't feel comfortable making statements.
Unfortunate situation all of the way around. What I don't get is why it took so incredibly long to resolve. It's almost like the city's traffic engineers were asleep and couldn't figure out where to start clearing first in order to unclog the logjam...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Stuff like this is just going to happen. It is pointless to buy all of the equipment needed to fight snow for Atlanta as it won't pay off. The city had to make a call and they used their best available data. They were wrong. If they err on the other side and are constantly making the more conservative call money will also be lost.
Schools, churches and even the Home Depot acted as overnight shelters for people who were stuck. The only thing they could really have done is had a traffic team (cops and tow trucks) that understands traffic better and unsnarled key positions and TRIED to keep vehicles moving. Not easy.
You are aware that most tires on new vehicles have "M&S" emblazoned on them, which means Mud and Snow, right?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Well it would take some 10 inch of snow or some serious freezing rain / ice to deter canucks from driving. This being said, it also has to be mentioned that winter tires are mandatory in some provinces. And since the white season can take up to 6 months, not only are people experienced with driving in such conditions, but they are also choosing their vehicles according to their winter driving experience and skills.
I live here in Atlanta. I work from home and I convinced my wife to stay at home (she's 7 months pregnant). So we didn't have to deal with the mess. One thing I would note though, there were probably 3 times in the last month where we were told we would have snow and it never happened. I think that might have made people feel like this was another false threat.
I'm amazed that a politician of all people took the gamble in that direction. Maybe it'll come up at the next election that you blew through a cool couple of million for a snow day that never happened, but everyone will remember the time they wasted a tank of gas trying to travel two miles and their kids were trapped at school overnight.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Come on, I have lived in North Dakota and Minnesota my whole life, and I have never seen pre-emptive salting. Heck, most places up here don't even use salt because it doesn't do anything beneficial when temperatures are 0F and lower for weeks at a time.
The only answer is to get comfortable driving in wet conditions, and then be more careful. I drove through two winters with summer tires because I was too lazy to change them, and I still had little issue starting, stopping, and turning on icy roads. People who only drive on dry pavement become complacent about paying attention to the way their vehicle is balanced.
see http://raleighskyline.com/content/2006/11/21/the-half-inch-of-snow-that-paralyzed-raleigh/
It happened here, and now, even the remote possibility of snow/ice shuts everything down.
Ok granted Atlanta dropped the ball. But the drivers are being complete idiots. Probably due to poor basic science education.
Yes the road are unsalted. and most of the cars have summer tires... However to be dead stopped for days is just retarded.
Boadcast these instructions over the radio.
1. Keep Calm, don't panic.
2. Accelerate Slowly
3. Decelerate Slowly
4. Drive Slowly
5. Double or Triple your distance that you normally are between you and the car in font of you, to allow more time to stop.
I am seeing on the news complete idiots just hitting the gas spinning their wheels and driving out of control. The it is a Gas Pedal not a Gas Button, you can use it to drive at various speeds.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It means nothing. Recommended reading here:
http://www.1010tires.com/store/content/winter-tires-guide.aspx
I wish I had the details to do the math on this. What is the cost of 500 snowplows that just need to be warehoused for 999 days then rolled out once every three years? What is the cost in salt, labor, maintenance? Now compare that to the cost of hundreds of thousands of people stuck in gridlock for up to 18 hours? Answer that and maybe we'll know why they should buy and store all those trucks to roll out on those once in a blue moon snow-storm type scenarios.
My gut tells me the actual cost of the last few days of hell in the Atlanta area is greater than the cost of 500 trucks and some warehouse space.
But I am willing to admit I'm wrong if someone can show me the math.
There is no way the gov. authorities could have prevented the problem. Business and schools let out early and created a huge traffic problem and temperatures dropped well into the 20's (F). All most all roads despite traffic became iced over. The city and state did not possess enough sand, salt to cover the affected areas besides by this time there were abandoned cars and trucks. It took my daughter 7 hours to go about 10 miles from work to home mostly due to blocked streets and jammed up traffic.
"Why would you in a city that gets one snow event every three years? Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?"
I shall become rich and famous by inventing a novel type of financial transaction whereby one makes a payment in exchange for the temporary use of goods or property. I shall name it... "Compensated borrowing". Nobel Prize in Economics, here I come!
This wouldn't be so embarrassing if the weather service would just delete all that old incriminating information.
The city here doesn't even plow or salt for 2 inches of snow. We've been having 2 inches of snow almost on a daily basis all winter, some days we have had 18 inches and still the city doesn't come to a standstill, there are no snow days at work even though there was a state of emergency and the city didn't start plowing until 8am.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?""
That's why you repurpose existing equipment. Snowplows themselves aren't a huge investment, and they last basically forever with little maintenance. Put a clause in your purchasing specs that all newly purchased garbage trucks and DOT dump trucks must have hookups for a plow. Retrofitting is expensive but if you're buying a truck anyway, the additional cost isn't much. Even dump trucks without special spreading equipment can be used; some dump trucks have small sliding gates on the main gate like this one. This is normally used for shoveling out small quantities of asphalt when patching roads, but in a pinch you could open them up and spread salt/sand on the road. Get creative! Making plans is cheap.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Salt trucks up here aren't single purpose trucks. They are just dump trucks/pick ups with sanders on them. The sanders can't be terribly expensive and the city could buy them and contract out with private companies to do the sanding. Sand and dump trucks/pick ups are used in building everywhere. The sanders are the only thing you need sitting around and those can be added on as you need them. This drives down the costs and lets you spend on only the things you need to spend on.
The comments sections on quite a few sites were filled with degrading comments for us "sutherns" freakin' out about 2 inches of snow. There are a few things I'd like to point out before this thread fills with the same stuff:
1) I'm in Louisiana. I can count the times it's snowed like this on one hand in my 36 years here. We don't get much of a chance to practice winter driving.
2) We're simply not equipped to deal with the snow. We don't have snow plows or salting/sanding machines. Yes, I still feel that purchasing this type of equipment is a waste of taxpayer money to prepare for an event that happens maybe for one day every 5 years at the most. Do you see Rhode Island spending money on earthquake proof buildings for example?
3) It was more of a problem with ice than snow. The roads had started to form a pretty thick layer of ice on Monday morning (I know because I had to drive through it).
That said, here in Louisiana roads and schools were closed starting on Monday afternoon. I'm not sure what Atlanta was thinking to wait until Tuesday to do this, but like the article says, there could have been uproar if they cried wolf.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
As a side note, snow in Atlanta usually falls as large wet clumps that are already melting. This week was the first time in decades where Atlanta has gotten true, powder snow. So a lot of people here have no idea how to drive in this weather, and it only takes a handful of cars not being able to make it up a hill or hitting an ice patch to shut down an entire interstate.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Sure, sure. Southtown got its snow, but on the plus side, Santa gets a day of Spring at the North Pole. That's the deal.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Come on, this mayor is either stupid or has stupid advisors. Either way he's misleading the public. Atlanta COULD have been prepared.
You don't buy 500 snowplows. That's ludicrous unless you're in the Arctic. You put enormous plows on dump trucks and (relatively inexpensive) sanders on the back. You buy a warehouse and fill it with sand (tip: it won't go bad). You pay private contractors (who may come down from the North) with snowplows. It may be expensive but your people will thank you for it at the end of the day when they are home instead of squatting at a Home Depot, and you haven't done something stupid like owning 500 snow plows.
The same reason you would buy and maintain external offsite backups for your computers. Techies know things go wrong, it's a matter of when. When, precisely, will normal people learn this too? Hopefully before killing ourselves.
Yeah Atlanta could have prepared better for the occasional storm... there should be some kind of equipment lending program among several southern states for the occasional event like this... that said, I'm from Buffalo. It takes a several feet to shut us down, and in the summers it can reach 99 def F. And yet, we seem to do just fine, I took my driving test 30 yrs ago in worse stuff than this.
C|N>K
"money would have been lost, and people would have complained."
Money is a LOT more important than public safety and life. Honestly I really hop that people start suing the crap out of the city of atlanta for their lack of care about the public safety.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There's quite a few of us Northern transplants down here in metro Atlanta. Tuesday morning at about 11am, it was snowing hard and from growing up in this crap, I knew it was going to bad. I called my wife to get home ( she ignored my warning and spent 13 hours in traffic - and I was worried sick.) . At 10:30 am, I was in the super market and it was packed with folks. A bunch of us knew it was gonna hit hard and there must have been in state government who knew.
The traffic jams were caused by every woman fleeing the city at once, in a desperate search for some real men.
I live in the South and every time there's a tornado or severe thunderstorm around here people from other parts of the nation gasp "How can you live there, it's terrible." While we in the South chuckle when folks up North go sliding into each other on iced over roads. It comes down to dealing with what you're used to. If you have snow rarely in an area, there's no justification for heavy snow removal equipment rather just some common sense. Sure, there's always a social impact to these kinds of events, schools closing, people unable to get to their jobs etc. but it's much better than getting stuck out on a road with thousands of others in the same predicament. Oh, I can also recall back in 2010, getting stuck in DC in a Hotel for three days during a blizzard and its aftermath. It was called Snowmageddon. Stores, restaurants and public transit was shutdown. Also, you couldn't get a cab to get yourself out. Sure the snowplows came through but they left 6 foot drifts along the sidewalks that you had to climb over. That wasn't a great business trip to say the least but it pointed out to me that even in DC, where Snow does fall in the Winter, once in awhile you can get a bad storm and it can shut things down. Thousands of people were stuck trying to get home as well, so Deja Vu?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I saw a salt truck driving at 1 mph, I know what parade speed is 3mph and it wasn't going that fast. It was salting one lane of a 3 lane road. But the assholes had the other 2 lanes blocked so no passing the truck. Things would have been to let traffic through and drive on the snow and not done anything.
They took the worst possible course of action.
Several things seemed to make this event different from similar snowfall events that I've seen here in the last 20 years or so.
When snowfall occurs here it is usually a passing cold front event in an otherwise seasonable temperature period with daytime temps in the 40's or high 30's. So when snow falls, it pretty much melts in the streets until after 5PM or so when the temps start to drop. This time, we had several days of very cold weather preceding the snowfall and it was as if the streets' thermal mass had already been depleted. Snow hitting the streets initially melted but started to freeze into ice sheets quickly, more quickly than usual. By about 1PM many streets, especially surface streets with plenty of shade, were already covered with a thick ice sheet.
Atlanta has lots of creeks and small rivers with bridges. Atlanta is also quite a hilly place. Bridges ice before the main road, and bridges here are often at the bottom of a hill in both directions. So all the bridges and all the low-lying areas at the bottom of hills froze first. Many cars could not make it up the icy slope. Even minor slopes on surface streets especially became impassible due to the ice. Again, all this happened much earlier in the day than people have come to expect.
I live 4.5 miles from work, normally an 8-12 minute commute. I left my office at 12:45PM and it took me 2.5 hours and I had to use multiple alternative routes as I encountered several places where bridges and low-lying areas were impossible to get through. Luckily I know multiple routes home and was able to mentally plot the flattest route home and wind my way through interconnected neighborhoods. Even still, I used the GPS to avoid the dead ends that are common in neighborhoods. A co-worker left 15 minutes after I did, and 4.5 hours later made it as far as my house--he stopped for a bathroom break and made it home a full 12 hours after he left. My brother-in law left downtown at 2:30PM, two hours later managed to pick up his wife who works 1 mile away from where he works. At 8:30PM we used the computer traffic reports and google maps to get them off the interstate through neighborhoods, and by 1:30AM they had made it to our house. We figure it was another 8 hours to their house. Good thing he had taken his 4-wheel drive "hunting pickup" to work that morning.
Everyone started leaving offices after about 12PM-3PM, which normally would have been plenty soon but by then it was already too late on too many surface streets, so even the main roads which had been pre-treated and the interstates which have enough traffic to provide hot exhaust and tire friction heat to keep lanes open backed up--people exiting onto surface streets had no where to go.
Businesses and schools took a chance, given that the forecast had called for the snowfall to be south of the city. With much of the population in metro-ATL actually being north of the city, to forecast made many people in north metro-ATL figure there would be no real problem.
Schools in particular did everyone a disservice by staying open, then announcing early dismissals at 12:30PM or so. So tens of thousands of overwrought mommies and daddies jumped on the roads at the same time to make sure their precious offspring didn't have to risk a bus ride.
Also, the cell phone system was overloaded. So many people stuck in their cars for so long panicking chewed up all the bandwidth.
It means nothing.
I believe it refers to tread design. Tread compound, not so much...
It means nothing. Recommended reading here: http://www.1010tires.com/store...
Personally I think the graph underestimates the difference between all-season and summer tyres. I have driven with summer, all-season and winter tyres, and all-season tyres really are much better than summer tyres. Admittedly they are not a patch on winter tyres - but summer tyres are just useless in snow and ice.
"Why would you in a city that gets one snow event every three years? Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?"
You don't.
You buy them as a state or regional co-operative as an emergency reserve to be drawn upon as needed.
Lease them out to others when they are not needed at home.
If it is only a one-in-three year event, you accept the inevitability of snow days and shut-downs, plan and budget for them --- and take the heat for closings under conditions that a northern pre-school would regard as perfectly safe for kids and staff.
... I just came here for the global warming trolls.
Dark Reflection
Didn't close the city because, "..money would have been lost, people would have complained."
Aren't people of power in power because they can make decisions that might not be popular the the greater good? Look at the complaints and money lost now.. You're a worldwide laughing stock, and the economic impact is massive. Nice going.
stone dust. Usually pre-spread over bridges, overpasses, where freezing is most likely.
Atlanta is a very hilly region with many small bridges over creeks. Lots of interstate overpasses create artificial hills. In this case the several days of low temps meant that the road surfaces were already very low, so almost immediately all the bridges and overpassed iced over. Any low-lying area in shade iced over. Pretty much any hill or sloped road section quickly because impossible to drive up, trapping cars at the bottom and closing that artery. Pretty soon every possible way around town became clogged due to jams at the bottom of some hill that was too iced over for minivans and Hyundais to get up. People with 4-wheel drive trucks did OK *if* they could squeeze by the packs of cars (many empty and abandoned in the middle of the road).
Fantastic comment. Sorry I have no mod points.
"It's an easy joke made by Northerners. A dusting of snow shuts down an entire city and hapless drivers white-knuckle their way through a handful of flurries."
It was -15 here yesterday with ice everywhere and more snow than them. We don't close a damn thing even when there's a foot of snow. They need to put on their big boy boots and get the fuck over it and learn how to drive.
Yeah, which is sadly meaningess when the snow hits. They're fine for mud, useless in the snow. Proper studded snow tires are the only thing that are going to get you anywhere when the flakes fall.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
The ones that are gambling big time are the ones that are trying to hide that there is a climate change, and investing large sums into that. Atlanta problems are nothing compared with what will come next decade. And we will all (ok, at least the 99% of us) lose.
I usually joke about the Athens (Greece) snow situation, but it works. You see in a city that can get an inch or two of snow for a day every 3-4 years you don't need any planning. You wake up in the morning and you see some snow. Hey, no school! You can switch on the TV/Radio to verify, but when people wake up and it is snowing they stay home, no prior warning required.
Then, there are a few snow-plows, which are obviously parked outside the city since they are almost never needed in the city. And equally obviously, the one day they are needed there is no way for the drivers to actually go there and fetch them. So, you have to wait for the snow to melt by itself (quickly), and you go to work/school the next day.
Having lived in NY, I used to make fun of the fact that Athens is paralyzed with half an inch of snow, but after seeing the Atlanta mess, I guess they are doing pretty good!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
It means nothing. Recommended reading here: http://www.1010tires.com/store...
Yes, all of that is true, but all season tires are passable in the snow. If fact, for Canada, only about 50% of the people put on snow tires in the winter, yet we all get around fine. I have snow tires on my current car, but left all season tires on my previous one, so I've done both. Snow has never stopped me from getting to work.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Saw many people helping push stuck vehicles at least to get them off the road if nothing else. Saw just as many people screwing over the pushers by driving around the vehicle being pushed and then getting stuck themselves now in front of the original vehicle. So the pushers have to move forward to help this asshole before they can help the original person. And the process repeats!
After I managed to make it home (2.5 hrs to go 4.6 miles), I went outside and started try to help. I had some bags of sand left in my garden from a previous project and hauled those out to the road by my house as people were spinning their wheels there. I spread the sand over the closest patches of ice where I saw people stuck. Almost everyone rolled down their windows and said thank you, even though it meant they could move only about 20 yards further up the road. But one guy, who had to see me spreading sand in front of and under the 4 or 5 cars in front of him, as soon as I got done with the car in front of him and it pulled forward he immediately pulled forward and nearly clipped me *as* *I* *was* *spreading* *sand* to help him!
Out of sand, I started helping neighbors and other drivers push some vehicles. One lady was practically crying as she rolled down her window "Thank you thank you thank you". Most people a smart enough to roll down their window and take the advice we're giving them --"Cut you wheels over here toward the curb, there's some traction there." One guy *stayed* *on* *his* *phone* the entire time we were trying to help him and didn't do anything we asked him to do. Idiot.
Just invest in snow plows, they won't complain about sitting unused for four years. Just make sure that the trucks you have can use them. Having one is an insurance.
Salt spreaders are an expensive luxury in most cases, if your car isn't prepared for ice you shouldn't be driving. Proper winter tires is better than salt.
And look at the weather report, if the report says 4" of snow and windy, you will sure have 4' of snow in some places and no in other, causing problems.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It's not the snow. It's the ice. Canada gets cold and stays cold. These cities sat within a couple of degrees of freezing for hours on end. Pressure melts snow, snow plus water equals slush, slush freezes to solid ice, pressure of tires is enough to melt top layer of ice, and now you're driving on water-covered ice. Short of actual spikes, how are you supposed to get traction on that?
In a CYA move, the weather service always gives the worst case scenerio. We have been conditioned to expect weather to not be as bad as stated.
On the few occasions when it is, you get the "Great Atlanta Snowstorm of 2014"
All the surface street traffic lights were still running their normal midday cycles and not the rush-hour cycles that vastly favor moving vehicles in one direction. So every stoplight had 100 vehicles behind it even before the roads became impassible with ice.
Not all of Canadian cities stay cold. Calgary, for instance experiences regular freeze-thaw cycles resulting in a significant amount of ice. They only plow and salt main streets and a significant majority of vehicles are only rolling around on all season tires. Yet seems to get along just fine.
So the figures could have been
5, 12, 19, 24, 30.
Five times.
Shortest interval: five years.
Talk about deflecting blame. What does NYC use? Garbage scows. So metro Atlanta couldn't manage to outfit some of their trucks to take a plow and handle the main roads/hiways? Sounds more like sticking your head in the ..snow?
You think that never happens up north? That's par for the course much of the time. Folks down south (and yes I've lived there) have this notion that temperatures in the northern states go down to somewhere around the freezing point of nitrogen and stay there until April. Doesn't really work like that. The difference is that we have appropriate and adequate snow removal equipment and we are accustomed to dealing with snow and ice. I grew up in the heaviest part of the snow belt along Lake Erie and I didn't have a single snow day in four years of high school despite annual snowfall of between 60-80 inches per year. When I lived down south the only snow removal tool they had was a calendar.
How much did the city spend or lose during this man made disaster? That is how much you spend and if not enough then determine the worst roads or most important and be sure to assign those few trucks to clear those roads first.
idiots
A good set of tires can make a difference but that's not enough you also need to know how to drive in the conditions. A quick set of rules that help me.
Maintain your speed. {Slow down but not a crawl. You need momentum go through drifting snow}
Give yourself room to stop.
At Stops lights or stop signs, stop back from the drifts that accumulate on the corners. {if you roll up and stop in a drift you are probably stuck even in a 4x4}
try to limit acceleration or braking on bridges. {they are notorious for cross winds and ice}
Atlanta's excuses are pathetic and laughable. The governor shows some really weak logical abilities. Limit traffic into the city and lose money...yeah, some will complain OR Let people become stranded on the roadways and all traffic into the city get blocked...many more will get much more angry. I know which path I would take.
I grew up in suburbs of Jackson, MS. Ever since the big Ice Storms of the early 1990s, Jackson and all surrounding municipalities salt the high-volume roads whenever snow or an ice storm is predicted...even if it's predicted to be a light snow or ice storm...even if it's supposed to barely miss the Jackson area. If Jackson, MS can keep equipment and supplies around to do this, Atlanta can too.
Also consider the recent severity of storms further north and the recent polar vortex. Atlanta's leadership is simply incompetent.
The Snow Devil went down to Georgia...
I read story after story about how most people don't have 4 wheel drive, snow tires and they don't have salt for the roads. Most people from the north don't have 4 wheel drive and they don't have snow tires (all season are most common). The amounts of snow that shut down the south doesn't even justify putting salt down up north, it simply snows small amounts like that too often to justify it.
Really, you don't need a 4x4 SUV with snow tires just to tackled a couple inches of snow. In fact a vehicle like that is more likely to lose control and roll over in the ditch. A regular 2wd car with all season tires is perfectly fine for typical winter driving in the north. If you can afford snow tires those are preferred, but hardly required. Applying more gas if your stuck will never get you out, it will just make you more stuck. Slowly rock your car out sideways and back and forth and you can free yourself most of the time.
What you do need to do is remember to slow the hell down. You need a lot more stopping distance than normal. You also need a lot longer to start and if you pull into traffic like normal your going to get T-boned. When you do slow down do so before the curve and don't slam on your brakes. Most people lose control and spin out when they are braking. Try braking when you are in an isolated area to know how long it will take your car - not you - to respond.
There is no excuse for that kind of thing other than people being reckless. If the conditions aren't familiar to you, than slow the hell down until you become familiar, it's that simple.
I've been told that there are eight salt-spreading trucks in Georgia. Eight, for the entire state. How the fuck were they supposed to prepare? Purchase more snow management equipment on short notice? Maintain a large fleet of trucks for the rare occasions that stuff like this happens?
I should think the answer to that is rather obvious. Buy more trucks ahead of time. You cannot use equipment you do not have. But instead they did an expected return analysis and came up snake eyes. You tell me which is cheaper, shutting an entire major city down for a day or investing in a bit of infrastructure to deal with a rare but serious weather conditions. Nobody expects them to have the same snow removal equipment as say Cleveland or Buffalo but they under-invested even for Atlanta and what happened is perfectly predictable. It's a bit like how they built much of New Orleans below sea level when the inevitable flooding occurs they claim they never could have predicted this.
When I was driving in to work yesterday, the roads were nearly deserted. The few cars that were on the road were flying all over the place. While it's possible to drive [relatively] safely in such conditions, it's a skill that I don't expect Georgians to have. This just doesn't happen that often down here.
That is an important part of the problem. I lived down south for a while and quite frankly the people down there are generally very very bad at driving in sloppy conditions. They either panic and creep along very slowly to the point where they impede traffic or they try to drive like it is dry pavement and get in trouble.
The roads were entirely covered in a solid sheet of ice. Ice, with no road salt, no gravel, no sand. If you live in an area that regularly receives some snowfall, you've never driven on anything quite like this, because you've got snow crews prepping roads before the snowfall, plowing for the duration of the snowfall, and then conditioning the road surfaces after the snowfall.
Not true at all because lots of roads simply don't receive immediate attention, particularly in rural areas. I live in the outskirts of a major city and after a recent snowfall we had people at my office that didn't get their road plowed for 2-3 days in an area that by and large has adequate snow removal equipment. I drive regularly on roads that might not see a plow for 3-5 days after a snow fall and certainly do not get prepped in advance.
...I remember both the county (Cherokee) and the City of Atlanta talking about this 3 years ago when another light snow storm shut everything down. There were lots of words and phrases like "we'll be prepared next time" and "this won't happen again", followed by a few weeks of local news articles about how millions of dollars had been spent on new road treatment equipment and trucks and how materials had been stockpiled so that they'd be "ready" the next time.
I left my office at 5:15PM, luckily in a 4WD jeep, and got home (12 miles away) at 8:40 - and I gave quite a few people rides to various destinations who had already abandoned their cars (this one kid had walked from Southern Polytechnic to almost Wade Green [this is a long ways] without gloves and a light coat.) Mostly I ferried parents who had to walk to the local middle school/high school to pick up their kids when the schools shut down the buses (which was smart.) I went back out and got onto the local parking lot usually known and highway 92 to pick up some neighbors who were trying to walk home and eventually got back around 1:45AM - the roads at this time still PACKED with cars.
It wasn't until 1:15PM when I was almost home with my last pickup that I FINALLY saw a snow plow truck driving around (like an a**hole by the way) and his plow was up and he wasn't dropping any sand or salt.
It was the traffic nightmare from hell - and not only did the local governments utterly fail to plan for this event that everyone was aware of for days, they didn't react worth a sh** either.
The good news from all of this is that I saw an amazing number of good Samaritans helping out anybody they possibly could. There were people on quads ferrying people around and having a good time doing it. There were clumps of people all walking from their abandoned cars laughing and making the best of it. On most of the side roads, people were coming out of their houses in neighborhoods to help people navigate the zombieland-like fields of abandoned cars. My favorite was this old couple on Hwy 92 that were simply walking through the traffic handing out bottles of water to people stuck there. They were walking hand in hand lugging the water behind them (it was very sweet.) I saw lots of frustration, but surprisingly no hostility towards other people.
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OK, so you have made the choice not to put in the salt storage and buy the plows. Fine.
BUT when you make that choice you have to keep the consequences of that choice in mind when you make the choice of whether or not the city stays open when there is a threat of a storm.
EPIC FAIL.
Interesting as if you went to bed planning with the Monday P.M. forecast, you saw the NWS downgrade from watch to an advisory. On Monday morning it was a "light dusting". Tuesday morning it was 1" of snow. Actually number was 2.5" It's also interesting that that post doesn't have forecast past the Tuesday 3:38 a.m. forecast that supports their case. I wonder if there were later forecasts, or was it too late by then? You may want to read the forecaster discussions associated with those forecasts and you can see the forecast change from South of Metro Atlanta to Metro Atlanta back to South to Metro Atlanta.
If you you think the NWS and NHC nails it, maybe you can ask them about Charlie or Wilma or just the 2005 Tropical season.
Here are some real facts to consider:
People chose to be out. If you were on the road you were responsible, too. The mitigating factor was school's being let out early and parents having to leave.
Business and Government simultaneously decided to send everyone home. There was no coordination and there should have been.
The timing changed so the plans to salt and treat the roads was toast as the roads were full of cars. Can't treat what you can't reach. If you aren't aware of Atlanta traffic, normal rush hour is from 4PM to 9PM and that's with 8 lanes one way.
Some places "up north", e.g., Chicago are fucking flat. Atlanta is not. You can't go 1/4 mile without a significant incline. In addition, overpasses are public art in Atlanta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
So the alternative is to shut down I75 somewhere south of Macon or just go to Valdosta, close down the perimeter and I85 to prepare for this?
Any snowplow that might have been sent out would have quickly become mired in the traffic jam that coincided with the first few flakes.
By the time there was anything to plow, the main roads were already deadlocked because the surface streets (which would have been plowed last anyway) were jammed due to traffic lights timed for mid-day rather than rush-hour operations and many many many iced-over low-lying areas that created car traps. Bridges over every minor creek sit at the bottom a tiny valley (it's up hill both ways!). These iced over almost immediately making it very difficult if not impossible to get through.
Many people abandoned their cars in the middle of the road. By morning the next day, there were still miles of interstate with bumper-to-bumper semi trailers interspersed with a few cars.
1000 plows would have done nothing. It was over (traffic wise) almost as soon as the first flakes of snow hit the ground. The hilly terrain combined with the below average temps for several days meant that roads, especially the various "feeder" surface roads, iced over almost immediately at least in the low-lying areas. Once a few cars failed to make it up some iced-over hill, that road was jammed. It took about 1 hour from the first few flakes before the traffic jam on surface streets backed up onto the interstates.
Realizing that the bridges would be a chokepoint, I managed to get home by plotting the flattest route with fewest bridges I could think of using interconnecting neighborhood streets. Once I got off the feeder roads and the main arteries, I was only facing snow and ice and not 100's of jammed-up cars. Still, it took me 2.5 hours to drive less than 5 miles. I still ended up reversing a hundred yards or so when I came out of one neighborhood and could not cross the feeder road due to traffic. Was able to get to a different outlet and get across. I also parked once (in a church parking lot) and scouted ahead on foot.
Fortunately, I was dressed appropriately, able and fully prepared to walk home should I have come to some point were I was stuck. I also had a fully-charged non-cellphone GPS that has pedestrian mode. Just in case.
Not like people I saw walking later. One woman was still trying to walk in stiletto heels. Men in dress shoes could barely stand upright. One woman had shopping bags over her shoes to protect them I guess, but this of course made everything very slippery (seriously plastic bag on snow?).
actually, no.
when the NWS issues a "watch", that means something could happen. when they issue "warning", they mean business.
case in point: we get a lot of "tornado watch" alerts around here. That means pay attention, somthing might happen. when we get a "tornado warning" than means it's time to go into your hidey hole.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
First World Problems... down here in my tropical land the weather is beautiful, thank you very much!
Unfortunately, the advice on skidding is only half-right. The basic physics here are that the rear of the car is moving forward faster than the front of the car, and picked a direction (left or right) to move to get around the front of the car which is blocking its way.
So:
1. Steering into the skid is always correct (provided you can safely move that direction), because it puts the front of the car in front of where the back is trying to go, which slows down the back.
2. Never hit the brakes in a skid if you can at all help it. (I've had to once because I went round a curve and discovered that the highway had gone from moving about 75km/h to stopped with no time to slow down, luckily I didn't hit anybody when I ended up in the next lane over)
3. In a RWD car, decelerating will help, because it will slow down the rear of the car, allowing the front to move forward faster relative to the back (think of the effect of attaching a string with a weight to the back of a toy car).
4. In a FWD car, accelerating slightly will help, because it will pull the front forward faster. Again, if you want the model car version of this, it's like pulling on the front end of the car with a string. Skids are also a lot less likely because the FWD is pulling the front forward rather than pushing the back forward. Of course, decelerate again as soon as you're on more solid surface.
5. In a 4WD car, my understanding is that skids are both unusual and pretty easy to correct, but I think there are techniques involving switching into FWD mode or only braking the back wheels.
But you'd be very surprised how many people live in snowy parts of the country and also don't know anything about handling skids. They're usually pretty easy to spot, since they're driving about 15 km/h when road conditions warrant closer to 50 km/h. My general view on driving in winter conditions is that the flakes I'm worried about aren't the ones falling from the sky, but the ones behind the wheels of other vehicles!
I am officially gone from
Yes, I still feel that purchasing this type of equipment is a waste of taxpayer money to prepare for an event that happens maybe for one day every 5 years at the most.
So shutting a major city down for several days and calling in the national guard isn't a waste of money? You think there are no dual purpose vehicles (earthmovers, pickup trucks, etc) that could be used? Salt isn't hugely expensive to stockpile and it's a rock so it's not going to disappear as long as you keep it dry. Have city vehicles equipped with plow mounts and keep the plows and salt spreaders in a storage lot somewhere.
It was more of a problem with ice than snow. The roads had started to form a pretty thick layer of ice on Monday morning (I know because I had to drive through it).
This is always the problem in more southern climes, the snow comes down and then becomes ice. So, duh, invest in salting equipment and contingency plows and be prepared for the occasional ice storm. It WILL happen and southern cities NEVER prepare for it.
If you have snow rarely in an area, there's no justification for heavy snow removal equipment rather just some common sense.
That's not true for a major metropolitan area. They have to be prepared for situations like this which are occasional but severe. They have to stockpile equipment that they won't need very often and have contingency plans in place. They also need to exercise appropriate caution when they know a weather event is coming (and they were warned by the weather service) and yet they fail to act upon that information in a timely manner. Some people died needlessly because they waited to long to tell everyone to stay home.
Never mind that if it's cold, a layer of packed snow on a road quickly turns into a layer of ice. It's for the same reason that we have glaciers made of ice when it's only snow on top. Tire loads slowly change the structure of the snow, eventually making it mechanically similar to a polished layer of chrome (hard stuff) on plastic.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I left within about 1/2 hour after the snow noticeably started falling. On a normal snow day, I plan to leave around 3PM because the icing doesn't start normally start until it gets dark and temps drop. I left at 12:45PM. I normally do not have to drive on the interstate and take about 4 miles on fairly leisurely 4-lane feeder roads (45MPH limit), then about 1.5 miles on 2-lane surface streets (35MPH limit) to get home.
The first mile I drove was easy and took about 5 minutes. When I hit the second stoplight I realized the timing was still set for mid-day traffic and not rush hour. But the road I was on was still flat and not iced over yet. Exhaust heat from cars idling at the stop lights and enough traffic was moving to keep things from freezing at first. But that didn't last long. After 40 minutes or so to go the next mile, still mostly due to traffic lights, I made it close enough to my normal exit to see that no cars were able to turn onto it any more. Several cycles of lights turned and only 1 or two cars had made the turn.
I realized then that the bridge at the bottom of the hill was probably iced over and preventing any one from getting through. I was able to u-turn and go back a 1/2 mile or so and use a alternate route. That was better for awhile, then I hit that route's bridge over the same creek and it was impossible. I reversed course and went through several interconnected neighborhoods (15MPH limits). Was able to cross the creek on one of their roads using momentum and good tires in low gear, after avoiding two other areas I didn't think I could make it through. I eventually came out on my normal road about 1/2 mile from my house and since the jam was behind me at the bridge I was able to get home easily from there.
The road running past my house has quite a bit of normal traffic as a secondary feeder road. We could tell from time to time when the bridge backed up because no traffic was there. After hours of having cars stuck outside my house, we started getting people ringing our bell begging to use the bathroom. Then I looked out and there were no cars. I walked down toward the bridge and a UPS truck was sideways--made it partway up the hill and slid back down sideways and was blocking traffic in both directions.
I still have cars abandoned in the street outside my house.
That's true, but there's something else at play here.
Many people in the Atlanta area get 3-season tires (aka Summer tires, not to be confused with Ultra High Performance Summer tires) because they tend to be FAR better in the rain than all-seasons.
See:http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/how-to/products/know-your-tires-all-season-vs-summer-9647443
http://www.tirereview.com/arti...
http://www.edmunds.com/car-rev...
So, here's the decision: Buy all-seasons to be safe for the 3 days every 3 years you need them, or buy summer tires to be safe for the 345 days every 3 years you need them. (Source: http://www.sercc.com/climatein...)
Toward Macon and the areas NWS predicted would be hardest hit. ATL was not supposed to get much of anything, just the southern edges. Northern suburbs not supposed to get anything at all. By the time NWS changed their official reports (about 3AM) equipment was in the wrong place.
Plus, see my other posting about how plows would not have helped!
Well since im from atlanta I guess I can say that honestly no one cares about the snow its is the black ice that doesnt end giving you a ice dragstrip. In the past 15 years i have seen 2-3 inches a handful of times and it usually stays in the yard for a few days and on the street till the afternoon the day after. Why in the world would i invest in snow tires when a week ago I was in shorts. I would use those snow tires once a year and im not putting them on and taking them back off next day. I sure as hell don't want the govt. wasting any money on snow plows just because people didnt keep their ass at home.
Calgary, for instance experiences regular freeze-thaw cycles resulting in a significant amount of ice. They only plow and salt main streets.
Actually, Calgary plows residential streets too, but they are a lower priority.
And it's rarely salt, it's gravel and sand whenever the temperature drops below -5. Depending on how concentrated it is even salt water will freeze somewhere between 0 and -20 degrees. Dumping salt on the roads in those conditions just makes a bigger mess with no benefit.
It would be nice if people who dump entire bags of road salt on their sidewalks in the middle of winter would learn to apply this basic chemistry first.
The forecast for Atlanta was "it'll miss us to the south"? That's a load of crap - I live in Richmond, a couple hundred miles to the north, and our forecast was "we'll get hit, with the storm moving in from the south or southwest". That was the consensus not only of the actual NWS, but of all the media forecasters. There's no way that storm could have hit Richmond and failed to hit Atlanta.
Also, Richmond managed to deal with our inch or two reasonably. Before the snow even started sticking to the ground (which happened around 4PM), they'd put schools on a two-hour delay for the morrow, and many people had headed home from work early. I left work at normal hours, and the drive home was actually easier than normal rush-hour traffic, save that all the good parking spots were taken when I got there. The only reason I worked from home the day after the storm is because I'd stayed up too late playing Guacamelee and wanted to sleep in a bit.
I won't fault Atlanta for not having the equipment to deal with the snow once it was there, because they don't need it, but they definitely are hiding behind a bullshit excuse to cover their incompetence.
There are some major things being missed:
1. The city of Atlanta streets were already getting better by late afternoon on Tuesday. The city of Atlanta was out salting & sanding a lot. On Wed morning when we finally made our last & successful trip to home (about 20miles away) the city of Atlanta roads were mostly good.
2. The interstates were a complete mess. No traffic was moving. The two times we were forced on the Interstate (I285S on the west side & I20W on the west side) the interstates were ice rinks. Nothing at all had been done. This was a failure of the state, not the city.
3. The problem were the tractor trailers. While many were stuck on the right lanes more than a few decided that where their buddy's could not pass they would pass on the left and get through. Then failed to make it. On a 3 miles stretch we were stuck NINE TIMES because of a wall of 18 wheelers. Only in ONE case was it a jack knife. All the rest were just blocking the way. We went on shoulders and even on the grass to get around them.
4. Trucking companies sending drivers through the city, and 18 wheeler drivers in the left lane should be ticketed & fined heavily. Having spoken to co-workers all of them saw the same thing repeated over and over.
While yes there were a lot of dumb rednecks with 4x4s confused why four wheels spinning on ice got them nowhere the biggest problem on the interstates was the truck drivers.
Just my on the scene perspective. We tried to leave Tuesday, gave up after four hours, went back to our office and slept there. Then Wed morning we went out again and a 20 minute drive took us more than 3 hours.
Why? 2-3 inches here and the only things we do different are leave earlier and drive slower. No chains. No pre-salting the roads. Just slow the fuck down until the roads get plowed or melt.
The problem was twofold: every single business and government agency let their people go home at the exact same time (roughly 12:30-1:00 PM). Even in good weather, this would have caused an hours long snarl in the city, but when you have masses of people struck with the sudden realization that if they don't leave now they may not be able to get up/down their driveways, then yeah, you get a complete traffic clusterf--k.
The second problem was that we weren't dealing with whatever dainty light fairy powder you Northerners deal with in which you think a snowplow would help. We were dealing with sleet and slush. "Wintry mix," you hear it called on weather stations. By the time sundown hit, most of the roads were covered in a solid, eighth-inch think sheet of ice except for those parts kept warm and shielded by the constant gridlock over them.
I know, because I was in it for 13 1/2 hours to only go 8.5 miles. There was no "drive slower" option for any of us on my route home, and I never passed a single accident on the way. We moved a car length every 2-3 minutes, and having to restart going uphill after dark meant that some people we sliding, because you need freaking *momentum* to drive uphill on ice. People were running out of gas and having to abandon cars. A lot of people were camping out in cars in parking lots or sheltering at stores that stayed open, like Home Depot.
I have a roommate who had to walk home the next day, and his time revealed that I could have walked home, walked back to work, and walked home again with a half hour break in between each leg and still beaten myself home.
So don't freaking patronize us. There's stuff that could have been done better in terms of planning by the city and in terms of more people keeping an eye on the weather (the midday snow took everyone at our office by surprise), but it wasn't a matter of just driving better. There was literally *nothing* many of us could have done from that angle. 99% of the people I saw drove sensibly. (Well, more like self-entitled jackasses who wouldn't spit on a man if he was on fire because it might make them thirsty, the way they refused let people over or tried to skip ahead using the middle lanes, but generally safely.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I was in Marietta (west side) at a dental appointment when it started to hit at about 11:00. Just flurries at first, but by 11:30 when I left it was starting to come down so I headed for home in Tucker on the east side. By 12, I made the decision to jettison my other errands and make a quick stop at the post office at Northlake then go across the street to pick up my contacts at my eye doctors. Just after I left there at 12:30 I got an email from my son's teacher letting us know that school was closing early.
By then, it was really coming down, but the major danger at that time were the people slowing down "just because". Traffic started to snarl as I picked my son up at his school and headed straight home. I began reading the horror stories of people stranded in cars on the freeway, kids trapped at schools because the parents didn't get the message until too late, school buses diverting from their normal routes and heading to the nearest school to pick up kids and get them home ASAP. Home Depot stores all over Atlanta opened their doors to people stranded and gave them a warm place to sleep.
Yes, the city and state government should have cancelled school and closed everything down to emergency services. They didn't and the Atlanta mayor and Governor Deal will pay politically for that. They had warning enough from the local meteorologists that have decades of experience in forecasting winter weather in Atlanta and they chose to ignore it (and later lie about knowing). Parents could have made the decision to keep kids at home.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
And now I see "experts" from all over pontificating about how "we should buy more plows and salt trucks", "how stupid Southerners are because we don't know how to drive in the snow", or other inflammatory rhetoric. Here are a few thoughts for those people to chew on.
"Why weren't you prepared?" - Preparing for a once every 5 year event is not possible. If the mayor of Atlanta (who isn't blameless in this) prepared for Boston levels of snow, he/she would be out of a job *quick*. It's like New York City preparing for a hurricane. (*BURN*)
"It's only 2-4 inches! I drive in that all the time!" - No you don't. You drive on roads that are prepared CONSTANTLY with salt and gravel, using 4 wheel drive, snow tires or chains. Snow in Atlanta almost immediately melts when it hits the pavement and then turns to ice from the air temperature. ICE people. It's not snow it's ICE.
"Southerners can't drive on snow!" - Actually, we don't have experience driving on snow and that would hold true if it were only southerners driving here. According to the US Census, Atlanta is the 8th most popular city for to migrate to. In 2010 to 2011, 82 people a day moved to Atlanta, foreign and domestic. I meet far more people from the northern states than I meet other southerners that moved here. I'd guestimate about a third of the people driving yesterday were born somewhere that uses snowplows on a regular basis.
"You stupid f*ing rednecks!" - Excuse me? Are you talking about the city where anesthesia first came into use (Dr. Crawford Long)? Where the largest beverage company in the world is located (Coke)? Where some of the most technologically advanced aircraft in the world are designed and built (Lockheed)? Where the Center for Disease Control is located? Georgia Tech? Emory University? Morris Brown College? The Carter Center? If that's stupid, I'd love to see what you have to offer.
I am Homer of Borg, resistance is - Ooo Donuts!
I am a rare breed. I was born in Atlanta and lived here much of my life. However, I did live up in the snow belt for several years, and I can assure you that, while I wouldn't think twice about driving in snow in Ohio, I try to avoid it if at all possible here. It IS different. One thing that Atlanta has that most northern snow belt areas lack is an abundance of hills. These do make a difference. Atlanta has always had problems with winter weather, but the other thing about Atlanta and this area in general is that the weather changes very quickly. It was 11 degrees here this morning and this afternoon it may be in the mid 40's. By Sunday the mid 60's are forecast. The cost of providing for extensive snow or ice removal is just not worth it.
Those not familiar with the region don't understand that Atlanta is in Georgia and those might as well be two different countries. After a 2011 snow event the CITY of Atlanta did invest in snow removal equipment and did have a better plan to deal with it this time. From what I have seen and heard the CITY really did handle it better than it has ever been handled in the past. That said, most of the traffic problems and grid lock seen around the world was NOT on Atlanta city streets, but on Interstate highways and State roads. These thread all though Atlanta and they are maintained EXCLUSIVELY by the State. This is where the politics and incompetence comes in.
State government here has been on a mission to downsize itself and transform itself into a jobs program for friends of well connected state politicians since about the year 2000 or earlier. The state highway department which is the organization that is responsible for all of the STATE roads, whether in Atlanta or not, has shrunk from over 7,000 employees to just over 4,000 just in the last few years. Many of the departures were by experienced people who left for the private sector or to county and municipal employers who now provide better compensation and benefits than does the State of Georgia. The head of the State Highway department, has traditionally been an engineer with experience. The current head is a political appointee who has no engineering degree and no experience in this area at all. This is just one example, but throughout the state, for well over a decade, there has been an erosion of competence in providing the services that the state is responsible for providing. This is not due to the remaining employees, who do the actual work, but due to poor planing, incompetent management and complete lack of understanding by the elected officials of what is required to run the largest state East of the Mississippi river.
I'm amazed that a politician of all people took the gamble in that direction.
I'm not. You have to understand that Georgia is a very conservative state. People will forgive you for "acts of God" if you didn't "waste" tax dollars (even if you ended up spending more later). People will crucify you for impeding business, running a nanny state, and wasting taxpayer dollars if it turns out *not* to be a disaster.
Oh, and the people hurt worst by it? Probably the most liberal counties in the state, so who gives a flying f--k for electoral purposes? It's not like you're going to win votes by getting rural voters to pay for salt trucks for the city. It's barely even considered part of the state by a lot of people -- just a Yankee colony.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
the last time this happened in Atlanta, I know they were sourcing snow plows and salt trucks from the Indy area... why didn't they do that ahead of time? Our event was over, and our next big snow isn't until Monday...
No they aren't! We're lucky if they're salted within 24 hrs AFTER the storm. I waited for 3 days for my road to even be plowed after a big storm earlier this month. Where do you get this crap?
They live close to Myrtle Beach and our town got about 1" of snow and ice. The town subsequently shut down for 2 1/2 days. People down there simply do not know how to deal with ice. Even if you're a carpet bagger from the North, you're better off staying inside and not getting t-boned by some guy who thinks you can drive full speed so long as there's no unplowed snow on the road.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
There are actually two Atlantas: (1) The City of Atlanta and (2) The Atlanta Metropolitan Area.
The City of Atlanta has a population of 432,000 and its mayor is Kasim Reed. Reed is an up-and-coming politician in the Democratic Party; he has been on "Meet the Press" and other Sunday morning talk shows a lot. Reed looked very bad during the 2011 Snowstorm, so since then the City has purchased approximately 70 snowplows & salt trucks. It has also trained its crews to operate that equipment. City crews were out and about on Tuesday and City-owned arterial streets were pretty passable.
The City of Atlanta also owns the Atlanta airport, so the City actually has weather forecasters on its payroll.
The Atlanta metropolitian region that surrounds the City of Atlanta has a population of 4.5 million spread over 20 suburban counties and a couple dozen small cities. The majority of these suburbs are very Republican and are the base of voters that elected Governor Deal. For example, Cobb County, where the Atlanta Braves professional baseball team are planning to move to, is the home of former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The Suburban counties and cities have not invested in snowplows and instead rely of the statewide Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT). GDOT does a really good job given what they have to work with -- they only have something like 120 snowplows for the *entire* state of Georgia. It never snows all over Georgia at once, so GDOT just moves its plows to where they are needed.
The other complicating factor is that about 1.2 million of the 4.5 million suburbanites commute into the City of Atlanta every day.
What happened Tuesday was the perfect clusterf---. About noon, all of the 1.2 million commuters all attempted to leave Atlanta at about the same time.... this was actually documented by the Georgia Navigator traffic system (http://www.511ga.org). These commuters managed to leave the City of Atlanta because the City had treated its roads, but then they hit the Interstate highways and expressways that are plowed and sanded by the GDOT. .... GDOT simply could not keep up because GDOT's statewide crews were also being used elsewhere around the state. The roads clogged and then what GDOT snowplows and sanders that were out got stuck in that traffic.
Cold ice is a drivable surface. Ice two degrees below freezing is not. The surface melts from tire contact.
I've never lived up North for any length of time, so I don't know about how it is up there, but it seems like South of about 38 deg. latitude, winter storms become very difficult to predict. That is to say, that it is normal for meteorologists to have a difficult time pinpointing things right up to 12 hours in advance. As you get further South, the prediction seems to become more difficult. Therefore, you have to plan for the worst, and hope for the best.
Now, Atlanta may not get much snow or ice, but they damn sure have to KNOW that the above is true. It is true of almost every city at about that latitude East of the Rockies (I know, I live in one). Therefore, you have to plan for the worst, and hope for the best. If you plan for the worst, and the forecast is off, people will grumble about it, but they will blame the forecasters, not the civil authorities. However, if you take a gamble, as they did in Atlanta, and the worst happens, people will NOT be blaming the forecasters, but they will blame those in charge.
Proverbs 21:19
But the 50% of Canadians that don't have snow tires mostly live in Southern ON and BC, where winter tires are marginal. For the rest of Canada, winter tires are a big help.
Why? Stopping distance. Some all-seasons do well with accelerating and cornering on snow, not so much on ice. Winter tires win hands down though on stopping distance.
Weather forecasts are sometimes wrong, to be sure. But all things considered, they've gotten amazingly good over the last 10-20 years, especially when it comes to short-term events.
It's your choice whether to ignore a warning. But Alabama was warned.
Kythe
"Wintry mix" is very common here in MN. It's not -5 all the time. Especially in November/early December and then again late in the season when temps hover around freezing. We get exactly what you got and we get it a few times a year if not more
Aside from that, we've had layers of ice and snow on the streets around my home in Minneapolis for weeks as is typical for this time of year. Snow will melt somewhat and then get compacted into ice over time. Snow emergency routes are kept cleaner in Minneapolis but side streets not so much.
Yes, sometimes roads are just impassable no matter what depending on what you're driving, but technique plays more of a role than you probably realize. For example, many inexperienced drivers spin their tires when trying to climb a slippery hill when all that does is cause them to slip more and make the road itself slipperier.
Even minivans have big-ass tires now.
And people die from falling down. Sometimes you have to take personal responsibility and your own safety into account.
Ahh yes the classic macho "personal responsibility" response. You know what? There are some things you just can handle yourself. Sometimes disasters happen that you simply cannot protect yourself from. Situations that require a community effort to respond to. Bad snowstorms are one of them. Cities have snow removal equipment because it is a PUBLIC safety issue. (see the emphasis there?) The city leadership in Atlanta has failed in multiple ways - inadequate equipment, ignoring weather forecasts, inadequate communication with the public, bad planning, underinvestment, etc. This is not a personal responsibility issue beyond a person exercising prudent common sense regarding their immediate surroundings but that is not enough. When an entire city is shut down, that is not and cannot be merely a question of personal responsibility. Even if you are able to take care of yourself there are other people who are not so capable and need help. Saying it is merely a matter of personal responsibility here really is a way of saying you don't give a crap about your fellow human beings or their safety.
If people are foolish enough to believe that they'll be safe when a bad weather system bears down on them, then it's their own fault if they don't get out of the way.
And if the information you are being given is bad information then what? The city leaders should have been telling people to take this seriously. They should have shut schools and non-essential government operations down. Unlike a hurricane or earthquake there is plenty that can be done to prepare for a snowstorm in advance but this seems to have been largely neglected.
What Northerners don't realize is the south gets ICE STORMS. Every inch of road surface is COVERED in ice. You can't get traction. We don't get true snow storms very often in the south. That's why everything stops - we don't get snow compacted which you could drive in. We get ice. There's not much you can do on ice.
Heres a joke for you. I was working a part time job for min. wage ($80 per week). I had to drive home (20 miles away) at midnight... through a FOOT of snow. No money for temporary lodging, no shelters (because this is a normal storm). Plows don't typically hit the roads til 3 or 4:00 am. It took 4 hours to travel those 20 miles. I have nothing but sympathy that you can't drive in a dusting of snow.
Metro Atlanta area is about 5M people living in about 2 dozen different cities and unincorporated county sections. The City of Atlanta can no more tell the City of Smyrna what to do than NYC mayor can tell Connecticut and New Jersey what to do, even though many commuters in the City are from there.
News to make nerds angry, stuff that matters somewhere to some people.
And yet isn't it amazing that a state full of so many self-proclaimed manly men driving 4x4s that can get through anything should be so unmanned by a skiff of snow? Here's an idea. Buy chains. When it snows, put them on. Help pull your neighbors out. You know, actually be a man.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Right. And there are no dump trucks in all of Atlanta they could have used, with some blokes on the back flinging out sand. Or farmers with fertilizer spreading machines, or whatever those things are called.
Even if you only do this on the overpasses, bridges and inclines the night before you expect the snow and ice you'll solve most of the problems.
If the increasing incidence of odd climatic events in the South has moved any minds about climate change? Are any of the televangelists now crowing about how much God hates the South that he's visiting such calamity upon them? Because I sure recall that happening when Katrina hit New Orleans and Sandy hit NYC. And I'm also wondering how many microseconds it will take before the South, which cries and moans endlessly about federal spending, applies for federal disaster relief funds. Man up, ye Southerners. Like the other man said, buy some good tires and drive sensibly and quit yer bitchin'.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
"So don't freaking patronize us."
I'll patronize you when it is called for. It is called for in this case. 3" of wintry mix is a mild inconvenience, not a shut the whole city down natural disaster. Oh yeah, slush/sleet DOES plow out of the way with no problems. Drive slow is the right response to such conditions. As to the whole needing momentum to go up hill on ice; yeah, not so much. Proper throttle modulation to avoid tire spin works better since you'll be in control. Then again, I drive through worse conditions every year, so I wouldn't know how to handle such things...
We get wintry mix worse than what hit Atlanta several times a year here in MN. Usually in October & November, and then from March-May.
Perhaps you southerners should heed NWS warnings. When there is a watch, it's about 50/50 if it'll happen. If it is a warning, take the warning as gospel.
OSX pwns.
I understand that without snowplows and salt, it can be more difficult... But I've often lived in places too rural to have either, and I managed just fine. You really can't chalk this up to much more than inexperience in snow. Granted, it's rare enough in Atlanta to understand that, but this isn't the first time I've seen excuses articles with excuses about lack of snowplows and salt. It's like they're doing their best to say "Oh no, it's not at all because I can't drive in the snow. As long as it's cleared away."
1000 plows would have done nothing. It was over (traffic wise) almost as soon as the first flakes of snow hit the ground. The hilly terrain combined with the below average temps for several days meant that roads, especially the various "feeder" surface roads, iced over almost immediately at least in the low-lying areas. Once a few cars failed to make it up some iced-over hill, that road was jammed. It took about 1 hour from the first few flakes before the traffic jam on surface streets backed up onto the interstates.
This was not my experience at all. Nobody needed a plow, but every hill needed salting/sanding. Both 75, 575, Hwy 92, and 285 could have been salted AFTER traffic starting crawling. In fact, this is what happened on 400 northbound. It was treated AFTER the bad traffic started.
Off ramps and on ramps could have been treated as well (this is where the majority of the issues were on 75 and 575) and the many dips and hills of 92 could have been treated as well (I personally was driving people up the median to get them home.) There was virtually no eastbound 92 traffic, very little southbound 575 traffic, and I've heard (but only heard) that the situation was the same on 75. It would have been simple (though slow) to get spreader trucks to the problem areas of those roads. If the police and emergency services vehicles could get to those hills to move cars help other cars get through, a spread certainly could.
The really annoying thing isn't that people were stuck crawling along for 3 or 4 hours, it was that they were stuck for 8-14 hours when it could have been mostly avoided.
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Really? WSB radio reports on the weather every 10 minutes or so, all morning. There's really no excuse.
Hell, I looked at noaa.gov and made the call to work from home Tuesday before I even left work Monday afternoon!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Lol, you've got that right. I was telling dozens of people that we were helping move their cars - "I know you want to stay in the middle of the dark 'pavement' but that's all ice - that white fluffy stuff just off to your right near the gutter? Your tires will work better in that..."
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Salt spreaders are an expensive luxury in most cases, if your car isn't prepared for ice you shouldn't be driving. Proper winter tires is better than salt.
No one was expecting the ice, and dropping hundreds of dollars for all new tires twice a year is more appropriately called "an expensive luxury" for people in a city that gets an event like this only twice a decade or so. Snow chains make more sense.
(But if, like me, you only apply them only once every few years, and the ones you have have a non-standard design that was just the last thing in the store before the last big event with some sort of crazy cross chain hook thing that you can't find instructions for after 30 freaking minutes of Googling and seeing example after example of more logical designs, then that means eff all too.)
(Yeah, the replacements are already on order.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Except Atlanta bought a fleet of sand trucks and snow plows after the 2011 debacle. My mockery still stands.
This wasn't 2 inches of snow. This was Sleet and ice followed by snow. Also, I suspect in your city that has regular snow all winter long, they city road maintenance department would be preparing your roads on a continuous basis by using salt, sand and plows.
You don't have to buy enough equipment to handle every street. But you do need to buy enough to cover the main arteries. You need to have something for a snow day. Right now would be a good time to ask for some money while this is fresh in people minds. Before the snow melts.
So don't freaking patronize us. There's stuff that could have been done better in terms of planning by the city and in terms of more people keeping an eye on the weather (the midday snow took everyone at our office by surprise), but it wasn't a matter of just driving better. There was literally *nothing* many of us could have done from that angle. 99% of the people I saw drove sensibly. (Well, more like self-entitled jackasses who wouldn't spit on a man if he was on fire because it might make them thirsty, the way they refused let people over or tried to skip ahead using the middle lanes, but generally safely.)
The issues with how the forecast was handled and what preparation was done before the snow have been addressed by others. What I'll add is, what could have been done once the snow started is, 1) don't send everybody out on the road at the same time! Other cities in other storms have made this same mistake. And it always causes the same issues. Once the decision is made to keep schools and offices open, not sending everyone out on to the road before the plows and salt spreaders have a chance to clear the roads is something that should have been obvious.
You close early to avoid people driving in bad weather/on bad roads. Once it's start snowing, closing everything early sends people out to drive in bad weather/on bad roads.
2) My mind literally cannot comprehend some of the reports coming out of Atlanta. 13 1/2 hours to only go 8.5 miles? We're talking about automobiles, right? Not trains on tracks?
People down south know cars have steering wheels, right? I don't want to freaking patronize anyone, but what about sitting in the car for hour, realizing traffic isn't moving, and heading back to wherever you came from? Even if traffic is twice as bad going the other direction, that's 3 hours to get off the road.
I know many people listen to podcasts and other non-live forms of entertainment, but cars in the south still have radios, don't they? At some point, doesn't the thought occur to check a traffic report? And didn't those traffic reports give an accurate assessment of the situation? And upon hearing that assessment, did the thought arise to just head back to your point of origin or just pull off where you are?
"Further North streets are salted well in advance of a coming storm but Atlanta doesn't have the capacity for that kind of treatment."
Oh really? I like how these people from down south keep using this as an excuse. So this morning we received nearly 3" of snow in Minneapolis. Were there plows on the road? Nope. Was there salt placed on the roads prior to this snow storm? Nope. Did the Twin Cities shut down the entire metro area? Nope. Today was business as usual. We drove through multiple inches of snow. What is the key to driving through snow. Slow down, keep your distance and don't slam on your brakes.
I'll patronize you when it is called for. It is called for in this case. 3" of wintry mix is a mild inconvenience, not a shut the whole city down natural disaster. Oh yeah, slush/sleet DOES plow out of the way with no problems. Drive slow is the right response to such conditions. As to the whole needing momentum to go up hill on ice; yeah, not so much. Proper throttle modulation to avoid tire spin works better since you'll be in control. Then again, I drive through worse conditions every year, so I wouldn't know how to handle such things...
You keep saying "drive slow" like there was some other option being taken. Did you miss there part where I described bumper to bumper traffic for hours on end? Excessive speed, sliding, and spinning out weren't exactly problems here. Just masses of people tying up roads that were overloaded with mild slipping issues going uphill from a complete stop every now and then. Most people had the sense to stay off the roads that were completely iced over. (And I think you're nuts if you think you could have driven up them without chains regardless of throttle control.)
Like I said, most people were driving sensibly. (By default, if nothing else.) I only saw maybe 15-20 incidents of people spinning their tires in the whole 13+ hours, and every one of them got it under control after a few seconds without needing a push. Moderating the throttle is not a hard skill to learn, and yesterday was good practice for a lot of Atlantans. I did see one guy fishtail in the opposite lane (while driving one-handed so he could smoke), but that was an outlier.
Driving skill was not the primary issue for why my commute took so long and certainly not excessive speed.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You misunderstand the difference between advisories, watches and warnings.
Advisory: Issued a few days in advance, it means there is a good chance of bad weather.
Watch: It means it is looking likely that bad weather will happen, often dispursed a day or so ahead of time if possible.
Warning: A warning means this will almost assuredly happen. Start acting on the advice now if you haven't already. Issues as far in advance as possible.
The warning was issued at 3:30 am and the snow hit at noon. That means more then 8 hours to prepare for this. That is plenty of time to close the schools, government offices, suggest that businesses have workers stay home, and get whatever salt trucks you have to start pretreating.
This was the local government and the state government that failed to not only act but had no plan in place to start with. I grew up in metro ATL. This is par for the course and has been for years. We can also certainly place blame on the drivers. In fact I remember driving in those conditions with the ATL drivers. You have half of them thinking they can speed like usual, and the other half going ten miles an hour. Once the lane markers get covered you often see 4 lane roads reduced to two, one for the aholes who think they can drive 70 and a slow lane for those going 10. Cars start bouncing off each other like pinballs. Then no one clears their accident from the road and traffic just snarls as traffic behind tries to squeeze by.
REAL northerners are NOT making fun of the grief and hassle that the good people of Atlanta are facing. We've all seen what happens when the weather gets bad, and we're having problems right now ourselves so we can all relate. See: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Ca...
So I wish you the best of luck and hope you get sorted out soon!
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
So, Atlanta didn't want to shut down business and government because of lost revenues. They didn't want to prepare ahead of time for such an event because of the high cost of plows and salt that might only be used once every three years. So I wonder, how much did it cost to bring in the National Guard, all the police, emergency personnel, and to keep all of the businesses open that became shelters overnight. I imagine that the cost was close to if not more than what it would have cost to be prepared. Especially if it happens again.
I wish I hadn't already commented in this thread, because this needs to be modded up.
I grew up in the north and now I live in the south. And while I nearly 100% agree with the following quote:
The second problem was that we weren't dealing with whatever dainty light fairy powder you Northerners deal with in which you think a snowplow would help. We were dealing with sleet and slush. "Wintry mix," you hear it called on weather stations.
My quibble is that this is not the "second problem". It is the first and main problem. It is well over 50% of the entire problem. All this business about people leaving at the same time is a red herring. Had they left over a period of half the day, the same thing would have happened. Because it is damn near impossible to drive on ice. In North Dakota, 2" of snow would have blown off the roadway before the plow could even get there.
Stay warm!
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
"Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?"
If only the same thinking were applied to defense spending.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm not nuts, I have a 320HP RWD car and I drive up iced over hills every year in the winter (Cadillac STS). Sure, it's easier in my Yukon with it in 4x4, but no chains needed; FWIW, chains are illegal in MN because they damage the road. Here's a hint, keep some kitty litter in your trunk. Throw it down on ice. Trust me. Rock your vehicle out if you can't get moving; don't just floor it in D. Try to get it rocking back and forth and eventually you'll move.
All season tires are what you need at a minimum. If you run summer tires on pavement below about 45 degrees, you're a complete fool. I suspect that is where the majority of issues came from. Summer tires need HOT pavement to work well. Cold pavement might as well be ice, say nothing about real ice and snow...
Hell, I don't even run winter tires in MN. Good all-seasons are all you need (blizzaks and other dedicated winter tires are the best, but I put on too many miles to use them). That and a brain cell or two.
You guys would really freak out if you ever came across black ice.
OSX pwns.
I've lived both in Houston and Colorado, mostly in Colorado. I've had a lot of driving experience, including some with black ice.
In the north you find black ice in patches, it's dangerous because you can't see it, and you can't see it because it's so perfectly smooth.
Well imagine that every inch of road for miles is the smoothest black ice you have ever seen. That is what you get in the south with moisture that freezes, the sheerest most slippery ice you will ever find. The humidity or the heat or both mean that the frozen water seems to have a little sheen of water upon it, making it that much more slippery. No ice I've ever found in Colorado, in the mountains or otherwise compares to the few ice storms I went through in Houston.
You are wrong to compare "unconditioned" roads, because even icy roads in the north are not much like the essentially Zambonied southern icy roads.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps if the region had not developed a reputation for constantly thumping their chests about how much more rugged and manly they are than people in the north, they'd get more sympathy from us. There was no small amount of mockery from those parts in 2012 when the Northeast freaked over Hurricane Sandy.
Well, payback is a dish best served artic cold.
3 inches of snow and they cannot drive with a 2WD vehicle? Are they retarded?
yours. Here in east Cobb and coming home from downtown.
Power's Ferry. Lower Roswell. Old Canton. Robinson. Piedmont. Johnson's Ferry. Riverside. Northside Drive. I-75. 285.
All iced over at bridges and low areas. Bumper to bumper by 1PM. Car's that could not make it up even gentle slopes.
out their grid because it's 85 degrees and 50% humidity.
ATL folks can say "Call us when it's 95 and 95, and shut up until then.:
Why do you think NOAA keeps getting its funding cut? They refuse to play nice and have "server errors" that wipe inconvenient truth.
I live in the metro Atlanta area and drove just fine with a rear-wheel drive SUV, but I did it at 5am when everyone was home, stuck at work, or off in the ditch. My SUV is like a pickup truck and light in the back-end. It is not 4WD and 4WD wasn't needed. The big problem on Tuesday was that so many people hit the roads all at once. Then 5% of the people are complete idiots and/or don't know how to drive on snow and ice, or they have bald tires. That 5% screwed everyone.
I lived in Michigan and learned to drive on snow and ice. It really is not that hard, if you know what to do. I drove home 11 miles and didn't slip once and it was 13 degrees F and everything had hard frozen. Sure there is black ice, got to be extra gentle on that. The problem was that the 5% screwed it for everyone because the blocked the hills and intersection sitting there spinning their wheels. I just drove around them slowly.
So, to all the people of Atlanta: GO FIND A WEB PAGE OR YOU TUBE VIDEO AND LEARN HOW TO DRIVE ON ICE!!!!!!!! It is not hard. Really.
Rule #1: YOUR WHEELS HAVE TO ROLL TO HAVE TRACTION!
If you are spinning your wheels, LET UP ON THE GAS. If you are sliding due to using your brakes, then LET UP ON THE BRAKES!! If you are sliding down a hill with your brakes locked up and sliding into the other lane: LET UP ON THE FREAKING BREAKS! If your wheels are rolling you can steer and aim the car down hill. If you're on ice, you're going to go down the hill -- accept that -- and let up on the brakes and let the wheels roll and aim the car somewhere that is not bad. If you keep the breaks locked up then you slide uncontrollably, and as we all just learned: THAT IS FREAKING BAD. Just drive slow and easy. Very easy. Easy on the gas and easy on the break. If you're sliding, let up off the brakes. Got it? It is easy.
Rule #2: SLOW DOWN AND SPREAD OUT!!!!
It is not a race out there. You need to slow down and go gently. You need a lot of clearance between you and everyone else. If you are hauling ass down the road and hit ice, it takes a long time and a lot of distance to stop. If something goes wrong you can't stop in 2 car lengths. DON'T DRAFT LIKE IT IS A NASCAR RACE ON ICE. GOT IT?
'Cause you can!!!
People just love to throw around blame in this litigious country. Wanna blame someone? Blame God. Shit happens. Just deal with it.
For snow, pre-treatment is preferable to plowing, because with even modest traffic, the roads will stay clear and you won't have to plow.
For Atlanta, a great deal is made of not having plows, and not wanting to buy them.
But pre-treatment can be done with bolt on (or drive under) spreaders that fit on the back of existing city owned trucks or hired dump trucks.
The best pre-treatment isn't rock salt these days. Most places with other than than freeze-solid temperatures opt for deicer liquids sprayed on the road from small tanker trucks, of the kind that are already in many city inventories, or which can be pulled by any Semi-tractor. Atlanta only has to look as far north as Virginia to see how its done.
You don't need special trucks, you need attachments for existing equipment. The tankers can be multi-purpose, delivering water for fire-fighting needs away from hydrants, flushing streets, etc. The sand/salt spreaders come in sized for pick-ups all the way up to dump truck size. You literally back your truck up under one of these and lower it into the bed. Any truck. Not a special truck.
You also don't need dedicated trucks to plow. Even in northers heavy snow country , they bolt plows onto standard highway department dump trucks, and keep the main highways clear. Its rather impressive to see a gang of plows, usually 3 to 6, running down the freeway, at speed, in a diagonal phalanx clearing three or 4 lanes at once. They are just dump trucks, with heavy duty mounts on the front and hydraulics for lifting. Often with a drive-under sander in the box. They use the same trucks all year around for other purposes.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Just buy a few snowplow blades for farm equipment and use those.
Only plow the freeways or routes with NO CARS since the force is too strong, or use a wire mesh exhaust diverter to cut the snow blown away so as not to puncture car windows.
They tested it in Norway.
Here endeth the lesson.
Oh, and stop burning coal. It makes extreme weather events like this MORE likely. If you live along the Atlantic Coast it could shut down the Gulf Stream in a few years (e.g. 2020 to 2050) and you'll get even colder winters.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wonder if it would be feasible to have some sort of agreement with a city that does have the equipment to come by and salt roads and Atlanta pays some kind of fee each year for help with upkeep. Though you probably have to go pretty far north from Atlanta to get to a city that's snowy. Might need to just have a collective or maybe the state or Georgia have them available.
Rock your vehicle out if you can't get moving; don't just floor it in D. Try to get it rocking back and forth and eventually you'll move.
Yeah, I figured that trick out pretty quickly too on the second patch of ice. (The first was just a matter of easing slowly onto the gas.) It's not rocket science. Just a skill that needs exposure to develop. Like I said, most people figured things out pretty quickly. I never saw anyone who just couldn't get through the ice (though I did see a couple of idiots just brute force through it).
All season tires are what you need at a minimum. If you run summer tires on pavement below about 45 degrees, you're a complete fool. I suspect that is where the majority of issues came from. Summer tires need HOT pavement to work well. Cold pavement might as well be ice, say nothing about real ice and snow...
It's a common problem in Georgia. Most people I know run all-season tires, but since the weather is generally good, tires don't get changed out until the tread is a bit lower. That bit a lot of people (including myself). I can't remember the tire guy's logic for leaving the older tires on my front wheels when I had to get a new pair last instead of rotating them to the back (something about wanting to keep good grip on the back tires in an emergency lane change), but it turned out to be a bad decision on ice.
You guys would really freak out if you ever came across black ice.
Trust me, we did run across it. Most of the ice I ran into was black ice, since the dense traffic kept the snow itself off the road except at intersections, where it was allowed to freeze in a visible layer. There was a decent amount of it still on the roads today under underpasses. You just had to keep an eye out, let off the power a bit, and maintain your lane, and it was all good. Thankfully didn't run into any around curves, but that's just a matter of not oversteering into a skid.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Friends call me Snow Mizer...
The plow drivers don't know how to drive in the snow, either.
As of Monday evening, half the local weather people were predicting we'd get what we got. The other half were pooh-poohing it and predicted we'd get nothing to worry about. As I went to bed Monday night, the pooh-pooh parade was full on. Nobody was planning to be closed on Tuesday. Had there been consensus at that moment, things would have been fine.
Since it was not unanimous, the bosses and agencies and schools all said, heck yeah we will be open normal on Tuesday. And everybody went to bed thinking that.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the NWS reaffirmed the snowfall and pretty much agreed with the locals who were saying watch out. But by then it was already too late. The notice needed to have been given four or five hours earlier.
Meanwhile the city and state, both of whom suck at normal maintenance and utterly fail at emergencies, both sat on their hands and hoped for nothing. They did nearly no prep work even though they had from 3:30AM until about 1:00PM to lay down salt or sand. They didn't do it.
And by the time they realized they actually needed to do it, it was already too late. The governor and mayor were off at event slapping each other on the back.
Kasim Reed always has been a bit of a doofus. This is just par for him. Nathan Deal is a country boy befuddled in the big city. His answer to most things is to get back on a horse and ride home asking what the problem is, if his horse can make it just fine.
Sig for hire.
Just spread cheese brine like they do in Wisconsin. This could be done with ANY milk or septic truck. They HAVE to have a couple of those around.
http://www.jsonline.com/newswatch/milwaukees-latest-antidote-to-icy-streets-cheese-brine-b9995766z1-223291751.html
I live in Atlanta and keep good All Season tires with a M&S ratings on both my cars and have been able to drive around fine (plus my car has All Wheel Drive). I can't believe the number of people who are trying to drive on ice and snow with tires that are obviously bald. The mild climate here has allowed them to get away with it. Perhaps a tire a check should be implemented alongside the mandatory emissions testing for the Atlanta metro area ?
I live in Minnesota, and I'm not intimidated by a few inches of snow.
On the other hand, I $(^&^ hate wintry mix, and sympathize with anybody who has to drive on it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
But we will patronize you, because you in that region are so incredibly hostile and intolerant of others. You strut and preen especially when the subject turns to your masculinity. Yet when the slightest amount of precipitation strikes you handle it with less ability than our younger sisters. You are silly girls. You cannot manage when even the slightest weather wrinkle disrupts your soft existence.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I can only think that one Atlantan was stupid enough to drive at his normal speed of 70-80mph on the freeway and crashed and blocked the exit, which prevented everyone else from getting off.
I lived in the Atlanta Metro Area in the early 80's and the exact same scenario happened, except the predicted storm arrived early. Everyone was warned and schools and businesses sent everyone home early, but while they were on their way home the snow (and ice) began. Cars abandoned, people stranded, schools converted to shelters. Every year after that until I moved ANY predicted snow storm caused a full mobilization.
HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT. Shut the fuck up, AshtonKutcher. You have to argue about every damned thing. The sky appears blue. You wanna fucking argue about that too, ya bastard? SlashdotParent saw what you were doing there. You just wanted an excuse to bash on some rednecks. You suck at it.
TL;DR: You don't know shit
You are an ass. You just wanna be all smug like you're better than Southerners. I highly doubt you're better at anything other than running your cocksucker. I'm gonna make a deal with you- you keep your self righteous ass up in Minnesota, and I'll stay here in Georgia, umkay? Come rollin' through my hood and I'll make ya squeal like a pig.
I won't argue that most people in the Twin Cities with 4WD and AWD vehicles don't have a clue how to drive them. I've passed enough of them sitting forlornly in the ditch on Hwy 10 over the years! :-D
That said, though, we're not talking about the loose nuts behind the wheel but the inherent capabilities of the vehicles themselves. When I was living northeast of Elk River up near the Isanti-Anoka county line and commuting to the south side of St. Paul, I traded in the 2WD pickup for the 4WD and was glad that I did. The 4WD was MUCH better at handling deep snow, which in turn made using back roads as an alternative to jammed up freeways at least plausible. Engine braking with 4WD also made avoiding the idiots who were overdriving a lot easier. ;-)
We lived far enough out back then that about 1/3 of the drive home was well off the freeway, too. More than once I had to tackle the last 10 miles or so on unplowed county roads with up to a foot of snow on the road. I hated that stretch in my 2WD pickup. In those conditions the truck had a tendency to break traction even with 150 lbs of sand behind the rear wheels. BTW, I tried my wife's Saturn a couple of times but it wasn't much better as it was too low to the ground for the deep stuff.
Now that I'm living in Woodbury and commuting to Richfield, I no longer regard 4WD as a necessity. I never see more than the 4-6 inches of the white stuff that you mentioned. I sold off the 4WD pickup a couple of years ago and I'm driving a front wheel drive sedan. I still miss the extra traction of that old 4WD pickup, though.
My next vehicle is probably going to be a smaller SUV with a towing package. Something that I can get up to the lakes with, out in the woods hunting, and reasonable gas mileage. Now, if Tesla would simply build a 4WD vehicle with a decent range... Hey, a fella can dream, can't he? ;-)
-Hothlanta
-Snow Jam 2014
-white peach fuzz
the jokes almost write themselves...
The Governor of Georgia is a coward, he proved it this week. This wasn't a matter of ignorance, it was a failure of nerve. The question is whether the voters will hold him to account in the next election. If they don't, then they deserve the ineffective leadership they've got. As for the mayor of Atlanta, well, the best you could say was that he got caught up in the proverbial "blind leading the blind" situation, or that he also lacked the courage to do the right thing (assuming he knew what that was). When the last big snowstorm hit New York the Governor there closed the NY State Thruway and the mayor of NYC closed the schools and major highways. That Thruway has been closed only a handful of times in the last 40 years, and the NYC schools closed even less. NY State and NY City have veritable ARMIES of snow plows with incredibly experienced operatiors available to clear the roads, so when they decide to close things down you can bet it's serious. The main difference is that in NY they've got the courage to make the right call. Just to show that I'm not singling out any region, let me add that the school district here in the North Carolina county where I live in made the call early to keep the schools closed, and buses full of kids off the roads. Sure, there are lots of morons questioning that decision, but the school district leadership deserves credit for having the courage to stand up and do the right thing.
All this discussion is rubbish. The simple fact is that DHMO is a dangerous chemical that causes this, and many other kinds of disasters. What are we waiting for? It should have been banned, like, before the Roman empire!!
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Southern WI got hit with 2 inches of "Wintery Mix" yesterday, along with blowing/drifting snow from the 2-3ft of it already on the ground (winds were around 20mph).
However, this is a state of people who have experienced the above a couple times a month during the winter season. We know how to drive and handle the conditions, and WI has really amazing road crews that work very Very hard to keep the roads drivable and are very well equipped for what they are doing. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, that same "wintery mix" with millions of people inexperienced in driving in those conditions and road crews who have rarely if ever faced such a mess and are ill equipped to make much of it. I am not patronizing you in any way, those conditions are legitimately terrible.
Were I down in that area during the storm, I'd likely have taken the day off or worked from home. If I had been at work when that hit and told to go home, I'd probably have found the closest friend to work and crashed their couch instead of trying the full trip home.
Then again I'm usually driving with a blanket or sleeping bag in the car in case I get stranded in the snow. Northern winters are not something to take lightly. It doesn't have to be snowing for there to be white-out conditions, all we need is snow already on the ground and a good wind. We also get a decent amount of real cold around here, while this year is especially bad, it's a rare year that we don't go down to -20f for a few days or a week. Most people here who do any driving outside the cities/towns will have gear in the car to survive being stranded in the snow overnight in -10 to -20 conditions, it's part of living here.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
True enough, but they issued the warning about nine hours before snow began to fall. There was plenty of time for schools to cancel, businesses to close, etc.
I can't remember the tire guy's logic for leaving the older tires on my front wheels when I had to get a new pair last instead of rotating them to the back (something about wanting to keep good grip on the back tires in an emergency lane change), but it turned out to be a bad decision on ice.
Look it up, it's standard practice to put the tires with the best tread on the back--I learned that a few years ago, renting a car visiting Alaska. It does go against intuition on a front wheel drive vehicle... I think the logic is that it's better to get stuck, rather than spin and (probably) crash.
I have been rolling the dice in regards to the zombie apocalypse for for too long then. Also, "he who purchase random goods will see good futures" (Chinese proverb I think).
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.
The problem is one of planning not of vehicles. Where I live, snow is a common occurrence every winter, certainly during the warmer days of winter.
The city does have a fleet of snowplows, but when a heavy snow falls, it's not the city's snowplows that handle the load but the graders and other earthmoving equipment of the local contractors. While graders are better with additional pusher attachments, just the basic blade will do wonders.
The main thing is getting organized so that the city can mobilize quickly the equipment of the local contractors in times of need. While it is always costly to hire those guys, it's certainly less costly to do it this way than purchasing your own fleet of vehicles that will rarely get used. Graders get used all the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://youtu.be/dw9dVWpcAIE?t=...
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
and a total waste of money.. typical bureaucrat thinking.
I work for a snow removal company in a more northerly city. We service some 300 commercial properties in our area, and a have a contract for servicing city streets when the city's crews can't keep up. In additon, we have a constant pool of subcontractors that we can tap for extra help when events require it.
The only difference between a "salt truck" and a "dump truck" is a salt spreader attached to the back gate. Ties right into the PTO system. Buy a stack of those, subcontract with some of the local haulage or construction companies that have dump trucks, and in that rare event of a winter storm, have a plan in place where these companies report to various city maintenance yards for outfitting and loading with salt, and get them out on routes covering the major roads. Highways being the priority.
Instead of $55,000,000 worth of trucks added to a city's fleet, all you really need is under $1m worth of salt spreaders and a bit of logistical coordination. That itself would make a world of difference. And they could use the money saved for some Public Service Announcements like "What is that white stuff falling from the sky?" and "No, it's not cocaine, get back in your cars and quit trying to snort it." and "Snow is slippery, drive a little slower."
With good summer tires typically outperforming winter and all season tires above 37 degrees in wet conditions it makes sense to get summer tires even if there's a small risk of snow in winter. Some of the best all season and winter tires have good wet performance, Goodyear's all-seasons and a couple of others in their price range are as good as the average brand summer tire in wet and as good as a fairly good winter tire on snow or ice. If you just by budget ones you sacrifice performance in all seasons for little gain.
There was literally *nothing* many of us could have done from that angle.
Well, except own tire chains.
The same thing happens in Portland OR. We get snow very, very rarely. And it is often very icy when it does come down, and our city is really hilly. It is so rare that very few people have snow tires, 4wd, or chains. So when it does hit the hit, even an inch, the entire place shuts down.
If people were required to own chains or have winter tires installed from Nov-Feb, the city wouldn't have to shutdown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCoxOReXlHI
Portland OR. We rarely get snow, so no one has chains, snow tires, or 4wd. When the snow does some, it is often icy. And the city is really hilly. The result is basically a shutdown even if we get one inch of snow.
However, our city government and businesses seem to be much more attentive to weather services, and we usually get notice that "everything" is closed early in the morning before we head in to work.