Alabama/Atlanta Snowpocalypse: When meteorology goes terribly wrong

There was also terrible weather for the Super Bowl at Houston's Rice Stadium.
The entire country is laughing at the South.
It's a joke how this has been managed.

 

10-year rotation for the Super Bowl (and NCAA Final Four) as well. That would also put an end to the pricey presentations and bidding wars and the potential for bribes and such. As things are now, it seems too much like a reward for building a new stadium at public expense.

Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, southern California, SF bay area, Indianapolis and one other to be awarded between NY/NJ, Washington and any other cold-weather outdoor site.

Another option would be to do a five-year rotation among regions: southeast, deep south, west coast (plus Arizona), midwest, east/northeast.

 

I don't have a huge problem with it being dangled as a reward for building a new stadium, but there are a lot of places with new or relatively new stadiums that haven't gotten a Super Bowl.

I think it should be like the all-star game, every city that can host, will get a turn.

 

When a lot of people left work, the roads were OK. But thanks to the traffic jam, they were stuck there when the roads got really bad.

They weren't out for joy rides.

 

If I recall correctly, Atlanta or the metro area has a grand total of four snowplows.

If you believe in small government, please justify the millions it would cost to have the plows and trucks that are needed a couple times a decade.

And if you think that local leaders making local decisions are paramount, who orders the 60 something school districts in the Atlanta metro area closed and businesses shutdown?

 

Louisiana had more snow and ice than Georgia, and had far fewer problems.
Closing schools and businesses for weather emergencies is the practiced norm in many places.
I don't want to cast aspersions here, but stuff like this is exactly why folks think Southerners are stupid.

 

What would you have done differently if you were running the show in Atlanta when that hit?

 

Get out the trucks before gridlock?
Thirty-something more trucks than last time this happened, by my reading.
This wasn't brain surgery.
It was too much for the Barney Fifes and their bosses.

 

Actually, the government officiials mentioned they 100+ pieces of equipment and 30+ trucks at their disposal, so the 4 number is inaccurate, although I have seen it quoted a number of places.

In the end, having live through this and been one of the fortunate ones, and now having been here for a number of these incidents over two decades, my thoughts are as follows:

Pretty much every other winter storm I've seen started overnight or on the weekend. That allowed for everything to be cancelled/shut down before any thing got going.

If we get a storm during the day on a work day, the only way to avoid the same thing from occurring again, is for people not to panic the minute the flakes start falling, and immediately rush for the door and the car.

And I have zero percent confidence that will ever happen.

Snow freaks people here. And that's not changing. Hell, I'vve told people for years that people drive in rain here like it's snow.

So, the city and the state can spend all the money that can be printed, and marshal all the snow equipment available in the northeast and midwest and it still won't make a difference.

Because the human nature of the Atlanta metro population will create work day gridlock again and again when this situation comes up next time.

 

Unless you were here, you may want to quit while you're behind on this one. You're making even less sense than usual.

 

How do you prevent the gridlock from happening before the roads were bad? The gridlock before the roads were slick set up the problems we saw after the roads got icy.

 

The four was what was reported during the 2011 storm. We were talking about that and I said "Atlanta had four snow plows." How that got translated to Atlanta still has four snow plows, I don't know.