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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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
Borrow from where? All of the other cities in the area that also don't generally suffer snowstorms? More northerly cities that are probably busy using their equipment, thank you very much?
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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
There is no way the gov. authorities could have prevented the problem
Try again:
http://www.wunderground.com/ne...
All they had to do was cancel school that day.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
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. 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.
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.
OK, cool. Where do you live? We can just bring up all of Atlanta and stay at your place for a couple years while everyone in Atlanta learns how to drive on snow and ice. It's hard for people to learn how to do that when we only get snow and ice every couple years. It's much easier when you have to deal with it on a daily basis for years.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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...)
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 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.
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.