And the city's 8 snow-plows (that's the truth) didn't help much!
Atlanta weather | Georgians urged to be patient as state digs out of ice and snow
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By Ariel Hart
As metro Atlanta endured the near-collapse of its transportation system for a second day, some state officials on Tuesday admitted to being overwhelmed by the ice and snow catastrophe while others urged Georgians to be patient.
The state DOT said it had done the best it could with limited resources.
With that backdrop, the Atlanta road grid disintegrated.
“Our hearts are going out,” DOT spokeswoman Karlene Barron said, describing watching video feeds of people stuck on interstates highways as overstretched DOT crews tried to help. “We fought the best way we could to help those folks.”
Deal, in his first news conference as governor, said "the weather has to cooperate in order for us to do what we really need to do."
Commissioner Vance Smith of the state Department of Transportation counseled Georgians to "be patient."
" There will always be a sunnier day than what we have had in the last couple of days," Smith said.
Smith and others who participated in a meeting Deal held with law enforcement, transportation and disaster officials were short on specifics about what they discussed with the new governor other than to say that everyone was working hard and doing their best.
"I think we are doing a great job," Smith said.
Officials in the state had several days to prepare, an unusual amount of time. The National Weather Service considers this storm “one of the home runs we’ve hit in terms of forecasting,” said Lans Rothfusz, the meteorologist in charge at the Atlanta office of the National Weather Service. They got the weather right, they got the time right, and they got the information out days ahead, on Thursday. “In the meteorological world, that’s sticking your neck out,” Rothfusz said.
At the DOT, Barron said the heavy mixture of snow and freezing rain over several days would have overwhelmed any agency. The DOT had warned trucking companies to keep out of Atlanta, but many freight trucks came anyway, she said. When they froze into the ice on the ground, removing them took enormous time.
And to make matters worse, she said, during much-needed shift changes twice a day, DOT trucks are pulled off the roads, allowing ice to re-form. That was a critical problem Monday, Barron said.
Robert Blackburn was the principal investigator on a report for the Transportation Research Board on snow and ice control. When told about Georgia’s crews all leaving the roads for the same shift change, he burst out laughing. “You don’t do that,” he said. “You stagger your crews. This is like having the emergency room of a hospital saying, ‘ell, I’m sorry, we can’t treat any patients.' ”
At the Minnesota Department of Transportation, which clears Minneapolis-area interstates, crews overlap in heavy storms, said Mary McFarland, a spokeswoman for the department. Otherwise, she said, “you can’t keep up.”
In planning, Georgia's DOT brought in crews and trucks from South Georgia, making for more than 150 trucks in the metro area.
If more would have helped, Barron said, it's hard to make such a purchase beforehand. "If we got those resources and used them once a year there would be questions about how we spend our money," she said.
It's unclear whether it would have been possible to bring in trucks or crews from other state DOT's, as Georgia Power brings in resources from sister companies in other states. That's rarely done, Blackburn said, but there have been instances in the West, he said. Barron said no resources were brought in from out of state.
With meager resources, DOT crew members fought the ice Tuesday in grueling 12-hour shifts. They reopened interstate highways that had closed completely, including the entire southern arc of I-285.
Significant Atlanta roads were iced.
“Lower Peachtree Street is basically an ice slick between the Midtown MARTA station and the Publix supermarket,” said Lee Biola, a transit advocate.
He said it seemed particularly problematic because crosswalks to the MARTA station weren’t treated and MARTA trains were the last reliable mode of transportation for many on Tuesday.
“The city doesn’t seem to be prioritizing the crosswalks around MARTA stations," Biola said. "If they have any salt at all, they certainly aren’t putting it there.”
The city’s chief operating officer, Peter Aman, said streets such as Peachtree Street and Piedmont Road are usually the responsibility of the state DOT.
The state DOT agreed but said it was doing all it could to keep up with the interstates.
“We are going to have a no-excuses administration,” Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said during a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “I want to be clear, from Day One, we were present and on call at all times. This notion that Atlanta was unprepared for snow just isn’t true.”
Reed said the city had cleared 150 of the its first-priority 200 miles of road, which touch on hospitals, police precincts and other important locations.
Fulton County has a total of seven sand dispersement trucks in its fleet and no snow plows. When the snow started falling Sunday night, the Public Works Department only deployed four trucks to spread a mixture of sand and calcium chloride on unincorporated south Fulton's main thoroughfares, Commission Chairman John Eaves said.
Assistant Public Works Director Richard Coates said he held back three of them at first because they are considered reserves, in case front-line trucks break down. When the intensity of the storm became clear on Monday, he decided to put all spreader trucks in operation, both to get more aggressive and to cut routes in half to give his drivers a break.
"I wouldn't have done anything differently," Coates said. "You don't want to treat roads too soon because then you might be wasting material."
Fulton Industrial Boulevard and Camp Creek Parkway were passable, but most side streets remained covered with ice.
The county did everything it could for south Fulton roads, given the resources it has. It wouldn't make sense to invest in snow plows or more spreader trucks, he said.
"You've got to weigh the cost vs. the need," Eaves said. "The reality is, this kind of snowstorm happens every 10 or 15 years."
If there's room for improvement, Eaves said, Atlanta and Fulton should learn to communicate with frieght companies before icy weather hits, telling them to divert their trucks around the city or suspend travel.
Eaves said there is concern that, if the supply lines remain paralyzed, the hospitals could run low on supplies toward the end of the week. A spokeswoman for the DOT said the interstates were all passable by Tuesday night.
About 30 people on county work crews have been working around the clock since 4 a.m. Monday scraping roads and treating them with 300 tons of a mixture of sand, salt and gravel.
The county’s regional transportation management center has received about 2,000 calls.
In some places there was little officials could do.
Towns like Snellville and Lawrenceville don’t even own snow-clearing equipment. They rely on the state DOT to clear major routes, and they wait.
In Duluth, some roads were open, but many secondary roads were “just awful,” said Audrey Turner, Duluth's director of public works.
At least one area found success.
While many cities across metro Atlanta still contended with snow- and ice-filled streets, Suwanee was seeing blacktop for miles.
Before snow blanketed the area Sunday night, the Gwinnett County city contracted with a grading service on Friday for a front-end loader and a backhoe. The city already owns a Bobcat and tractor with a plow, said Scott Moretz, the city's supervisor of public works.
Crews started clearing select routes at 10 p.m. Sunday and kept circling them all night until 8 a.m. Monday, he said. The route totaled some 30 to 40 miles, he said.
Workers were able to remove most of the snow by Monday morning. Then in three-hour shifts, they spread salt up until 11 p.m., Moretz said.
"Now most of the roads are blacktop," he said. But, he cautioned, "as much as the roads look clear, stay off of them because of ice."
He expects there will be a bill for overtime work, but "I'd rather pay the overtime bill and keep the city safe."
It’s hard to know what strategy would have worked to keep an interstate like I-285 clear, all experts said, because every storm is different. The storm Atlanta is enduring is particularly violent, they agreed, because freezing rain, not just snow, had blanketed the area.
But Blackburn said that on such major roads in a major storm, at the very outset when snow is hitting it can make sense to have continuous coverage by trucks circling back and forth, trying to prevent accumulation. On a road the length and width of I-285, that could easily mean upward of 30 trucks.
On I-285, Barron was not certain how many trucks the DOT had working Sunday night. “At the height,” Tuesday morning, she said, it had 12.
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