One mans opinion on how to prevent another Atlanta

Lots of opinions here on what happened in Atlanta. Not many correct. I live here and watched it happen and before I say this please know as a ex truck driver I have driven in just about everything.
First off this storm was supposed to be below Atl. instead it covered all of Atl, and about 70 miles north. This was not just snow. It had a fine sleet with it that covered the roads almost instantly. Schools were all released about the same time as well as government workers and private sector jobs. The roads were slammed all at one time which would have backed up traffic without the snow and ice.
I have been on roads in the north that looked much worse than this but not nearly as slick.

Well it looks like VA uses the same logic as TN: trucks with plows and salt start rolling with the first snowflake!
Also here in Hampton Roads, when snow is called for no one really asks how much...we all just race to the grocery stores and clear the shelves of milk, eggs, bread and adult beverages and snacks.
Since we have yearly inspections, our tires do have tread, thank you.
VA winters weren't always so mild as they are now, so some of us can recall when snow and ice were common threats and freezing temps weren't news.
Also a lot of facilities close early and at staggered times and won't open til all the roads are good. Schools esp. have to think about buses navigating little side roads that take forever to melt, if they ever do see a plow at all! Right now, schools have been closed since Weds.

Quote: What was a problem is that the falling snow ALL melted when it hit the roads, and turned into glaze ice.

Driving in Atlanta had absolutely nothing in common with driving in winter weather in Minnesota. People up north simply don't experience the type of ice storms we get along the freezing limit line.

The ground down here is very warm and we get ice, lots and lots of ice.

The only comparison I could make is if all the roads in MSP turned into hockey rinks over a couple hours.

Nothing but glazed ice. Before the traffic ground to a standstill - there was two to four inches of ice on overpasses and elevated roadways. End quote

I love it when folks make stupid excuses for stupidity. Ah yes, they had some type of special condition we northern folk never see. Apparently they never heard of 'black ice". I've towed more then one trailer on it and never crashed. The only time I crashed on black ice was when I first started driving as a young un. Landed one time in Romeo Michigan on black ice with a cross wind and the slower I got the more I turned into the wind to use the thrust to keep me on the runway. It wasn't the landing that was difficult, it was the taxiing broad side to the wind and walking afterwards.

Funny thing is, one fellow rode his motorcycle to work that day in Atlanta and decided to head home when everyone else did. Lucky, he had a GoPro camera mounted so one could see the road condition as it went from bad to worse. Showed the stupidity of the cage drivers while he made it home safe, ON A BIKE! I'll admit, I'm not sure I would have tried it for fear of getting hit by the 4 wheelers sliding around me.

On edit... thot I'd add a link to one of several riders who made it home: Bike ride home.

wny_pat wrote:

Horizon170 wrote:
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Thankfully this only happened once or twice a year. I would hate to see all that road clearing machinery sitting under a shed depreciating for 51 weeks of the year here in Atlanta.

And I would hate for you to have to be paying the taxes to own, maintain that fleet of snow plows, let alone be paying that manpower to operated it around the clock for a couple days each year. Any then there is all rock salt and places to store it. Better that the powers to be declare a driving ban and actually enforce it until the roads clear up.

I live and work in Tennessee. We have multi use vehicles in our highway department. They look like large dump trucks. They are used for everything from hauling debris, picking up road kill and doing general work most of the year. During the winter they wear snow plows and those nice truck beds turn into salt spreaders. We have about 20-30 of these in our area. They are used to help keep Monteagle Mtn and the surrounding area including Chattanooga taken car of in theses inter conditions.

There is more than one way to handle this and fortunately a modular vehicle system works well for our area in Tennessee.

When our roads get bad we just need to wait a little while and TDOT will get things passable soon enough.

Thanks,

Jeremiah

Horizon170 wrote:
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Thankfully this only happened once or twice a year. I would hate to see all that road clearing machinery sitting under a shed depreciating for 51 weeks of the year here in Atlanta.

And I would hate for you to have to be paying the taxes to own, maintain that fleet of snow plows, let alone be paying that manpower to operated it around the clock for a couple days each year. Any then there is all rock salt and places to store it. Better that the powers to be declare a driving ban and actually enforce it until the roads clear up.

Just an FYI, it does sometimes happen that the roads in the Northern tiers of States experience the same conditions as what Atlanta had. Where you have snow turning to ice because of the above freezing temps of the road surface and refreezing in below freezing air temps, the reverse happens in the North, freezing precipitation meets the below freezing road surface and all turns to ice. Neither is a good surface to navigate.

Gotta' remember, in MN we drive on the lakes. :B

You nailed it Paw Paw & Gram. Most folks have no trouble driving in snow, but ice is an entirely different situation.

CavemanCharlie wrote:
a local weather forecaster from here in MN posted this on how he thinks we could avoid another Atlanta type snow storm problem

It's pretty bad when a professional shows he is as completely clueless about what really happened as that blog post.

I've not seen such an inaccurate description of what really happened with the weather as his.

Snow was not a problem in Atlanta.

What was a problem is that the falling snow ALL melted when it hit the roads, and turned into glaze ice.

Driving in Atlanta had absolutely nothing in common with driving in winter weather in Minnesota. People up north simply don't experience the type of ice storms we get along the freezing limit line.

The ground down here is very warm and we get ice, lots and lots of ice.

The only comparison I could make is if all the roads in MSP turned into hockey rinks over a couple hours.

Nothing but glazed ice. Before the traffic ground to a standstill - there was two to four inches of ice on overpasses and elevated roadways.

Now, yes, Atlanta had a lot of issues.

One of the biggest is the lack of an emergency control system like most northern cities have.

Neither the mayor of Atlanta, nor the governor, have to power to order the schools closed. Several dozen individual school districts make that decision on their own.

Neither can they close municipal offices or other government offices except for their individual workers.

Metro Atlanta is about the size of the entire state of CT.

There are over 40 different municipal, county and state governments - each of which makes their own decisions.

The mayor of Atlanta has no authority or funding for sanding freeways. That is the state highway department.

They deployed their limited sanding and anti-icing capability to the middle part of the state - where all the weather forecast predicted the worst icing.

Despite the false claims in the blog - no one predicted an ice storm to freeze-up metro Atlanta during the day. The storm arrived a few hours early.

At almost all the schools, the government offices, and the various companies - managers viewed the weather predictions - and expected a near normal day.

Then as the weather turned bad - almost everyone was sent home at the same time - doubling normal commuter traffic, with school traffic mixed in.

Freezing belt metro areas - like Atlanta, Dallas, etc - need to develop a comprehensive area wide plan for central control of such emergencies.

Though that will never happen, because the next Winter Weather Warning - will be a non-event.

It takes about a one or two degree change in actual temp - between the gridlock ice storm like Dallas/Fort Worth experienced in December and Atlanta just experienced - and just a cold rainy day. Even one or two degrees colder might have been better - giving the snow a chance to stick rather than melt immediately.

I've never seen a private forecasting company, or a TV weatherman, willing to bet on their predicted temps being exact - no more than two degrees off.

That's all it takes between major ice storm or cold rain.

Deb and Ed M wrote:
Life-long Michigander (and weather-geek) who drove through the north end of that mess on Tuesday. I knew when the storm was supposed to hit because I checked the NWS website; so we camped N of Macon, and left early in the AM to be out of GA by noon. We also watched a local forecast - and the weatherman was saying that the rogue band of snow that was farther north than anyone expected was producing snow - but it "wasn't hitting the ground". I found that odd, because rain can evaporate (Virga) but snow??

Contrary to the weatherman's advice, by Adairsville, the snow was indeed hitting the ground, and turning to glare ice. Kudos to the folks who were sharing the highway with us - they were driving slowly and sensibly for the (awful) conditions. It took forever, at 2 mph, to finally reach the Tennessee line, where we could finally drive at highway speeds again.

So what was the difference?? Tennessee said "Snow coming? Let's get some salt on those roads" Georgia must have been hoping it would melt - because we SAW the GDOT salt trucks trying to salt the roads about an hour AFTER everyone starting sliding and crashing on black ice.....

I suspect this is Georgia's routine response to snow: pray it melts. But the air temps were in the mid-20's; most folks would understand that nothing melts at those temps

Here is a post I made on the last thread about the last Atlanta Storm:
Many years ago (I want to say around 93) I drove to Florida to visit my parents that lived down there in the winter. They got 6 inches of snow in Paducah Kentucky and everybody there thought the world had come to a end. We couldn't even get any food because they shut down all the stores and restaurants. The next day we took off down the interstate and it was terrible. The semi trucks had been running all night and they had all the snow packed on. All that was on the road was me in my RWD 81 T-Bird and semi trucks. I stopped at one truck stop and told a trucker I was thinking about quitting and he said don't give up your about 10 miles from the state line. The plow trucks from Kentucky hadn't been plowing at all during the night but, Tennessee had learned it's lesson from a storm a few year earlier and had been up all night clearing the roads. He was right, once I crossed the state line it was all good road after that because the Tennessee DOT was on the ball and kept the plow trucks going all night long to keep the snow off. The Kentucky DOT had not done that and there roads were packed solid with snow.

So, another vote for the Tennessee DOT knowing there stuff. Maybe all you southern states should take a lesson from them !

Why does everyone head out to buy milk ,bread and eggs ? worried about running out of french toast?