ProetryPlace Blog 41
The manager of Carrollton’s Cultural Arts Center waited patiently and politely while I finished reading a short historical fiction piece Tuesday morning at the Carrollton Creative Writers Club meeting. Then she announced, “Y’all go home. We are closing up. It’s supposed to get bad.”
For the past hour we had all been eyeing the snowfall outside the windows, and, mindful of the weather forecasts we had heard for the past several days, willingly and quickly broke up our meeting well before the scheduled Noon adjournment. Not more than half an inch of the cold, white stuff had accumulated, but I encountered a few slippery patches on my short drive home. A few numbskull drivers drove recklessly, unmindful of the hazards, and I was happy to reach home when I did.
Just after Noon, my daughter, a kindergarten teacher in the city schools, called to warn me to stay off the roads. The administration had finally released the teachers to go home and she had slipped and slid half a mile to get onto “the bypass” thoroughfare. An hour later she texted that she was finally home, a 15-minute drive normally.
By then, nothing except weather was being aired by the network stations in Atlanta. Even the soaps were preempted, so we began to realize something serious might be developing. Snow continued falling as the afternoon wore on, and the horror of traffic on Atlanta’s roads began to unfold like a time-lapse photo sequence. Television cameras showed the traffic creeping, then crawling then stopping. Reports of accidents mounted into the hundreds, eventually reaching about 1000.
By nightfall the unbelievable picture had fully developed. Nothing moved on the interstates. A total icy gridlock trapped hundreds of thousands of unhappy and unfortunate travelers, truckers and commuters in their vehicles.
Carrollton received the forecast accumulation of up to two inches of snow. Atlanta had been forecast to receive less, but actually measured almost three inches by the end of the day. Still not what could be considered a great or even worrisome accumulation or near other snow amounts that had fallen on the city. Only three years ago, in January 2011, Atlanta roads were under four to six inches of snow. The city’s record snowfall of 11.2 inches was set 74 years ago in 1940 when there were no interstate highways to worry about.
The metro population then was about 300,000. Today, the Metro Atlanta population comprises 5 to 6 million residents. No one in that area would think of working within walking distance of home, so every working day several hundreds of thousands of commuters clog the city’s highways as they drive to opposite ends of the metropolis. Traffic in Atlanta is never pretty. The roads are never near vacant, even outside the times of the major commutes.
The most remarkable southern snowfall in my memory (we have lived in Georgia only since 1983) occurred during the three-day “Storm of the Century” in March, 1993. That storm blanketed the entire southeastern U.S., especially Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. It closed all roadways in the area for days. Some of the ice storms we have encountered had even more drastic effects on us.
On early Tuesday afternoon, those hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, drivers hit the interstates and turned the snowy road surface into a skating rink. No traction. No movement. No hope. Many abandoned their vehicles on and off the roadways and took off on foot to seek warmth, food, shelter or just a place to pee. School children were trapped on immobile school buses. A baby was born in an automobile unable to reach the hospital while nearby cars spun their wheels in a futile effort to move and with no place to go.
Temperatures remained between about 3 to 30 degrees for the next two days, preventing any significant thawing except in exceptionally sunny spots. My son, a professional driver, was stuck north of Atlanta, unable to reach home for two days. Similarly, my daughter and granddaughter remained at their workplaces for two days before attempting to reach home.
I ventured out in Carrollton on Thursday and found several icy patches still on the roads. The nearby strip mall was nearly deserted with only Home Depot and the Kroger supermarket open for business. The Times Georgian and the U.S. Mail (three days’ worth) were finally delivered on Friday, and Friday night every restaurant in town was deluged with hungry customers suffering severely with cabin fever.
All’s well that ends well, and the situation might have been even much worse. The city of Carrollton, like most cities in Georgia, has no means to deal with snow and ice except to urge its citizens to pray for any early thaw. Atlanta, however, does have plows and sand trucks and supplies of de-icing chemicals. Apparently, none of these were deployed this past week. By the time anyone thought to do anything, it was too late. Those trucks and plows sat idly with no way to access the streets that were already bumper to bumper with stalled vehicles.
For two days after the “storm,” city and state officials provided their own snow jobs for hours at a time on network TV. Excuses piled upon excuses while they tossed the snowball from one to another.
Could the traffic fiasco in and around Atlanta have been prevented? I certainly hope so and that someone in charge may have learned from the experience. Still, I refrain from passing judgment. Let us just say that it was a case of humankind versus nature and nature always wins.
~
Now the nation’s attention has turned to the weather in East Rutherford, NJ, where Super Bowl XLVIII between the Denver Broncos (best offense) and the Seattle Seahawks (best defense) is scheduled to commence at 6:30 PM EST. Earlier worries about icy precipitation seem to have evaporated. However, the playing field at Met Life Stadium is frozen hard as concrete, so Mother Nature may still have a say in the outcome of this meeting of titans.
I have to hope for a Denver win. I would like to wish Peyton Manning this ultimate success in his comeback from injuries. Also, my daughter, who has been shoveling snow in Denver for the past two days, would not forgive me if I didn’t.
Richard Allen Anderson, 2/2/14 Http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com
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