Alabama/Atlanta Snowpocalypse: When meteorology goes terribly wrong

Re: Alabama Snowpocalypse: When meteorology goes terribly wrong

JR, do y'all get a layer of ice and sleet up there before the snow hits? That's usually the case down here, which is one reason we have a difficult time driving. It's rare for us to get just snow.

 

Yep. And, when it snows during the PM commute, everyone is fucked, because even in northern cities, the plows can't get through the traffic.

Took me 4 hours to get home about 20 miles from Schaumburg a couple of winters ago when a storm hit in the afternoon.

 

Not usually although we've had a couple of bad ice storms this year. Ice is your worst nightmare, particularly black ice but I'd say 90% of the time it's just snow.

It's usually pretty cold and almost every snowfall this winter has been the light, fluffy stuff, not the snowman/snowperson making stuff. You just brush your car off and off you go.

 

The worst storms for traffic here, and they are common due to our proximity to the ocean, is rain changing to snow (or vice versa) followed by a rapid temperature drop and a flash freeze. When slush turns to concrete and puddles to ice, there's not much anyone can do about it.

 

With 500 people having died in Chicago in the 1995 heat wave, I'll refrain from snarky comments about how Southerners handle snow. As for public transit, that would have helped some, no doubt, but if the system isn't built for the weather, you can still end up with problems.

During the recent cold snap in Chicago, Metra, the suburban train system, has been a joke. Its switches get balky when the temperature drops below 10, and a lot of very fine snow apparently can also get into the switches and screw things up. So even if Atlanta had the most robust train system on Earth, I doubt its system would be built in a way that would make it flawless in freezing weather and snow/ice.

 

AJC sports columnist Mark Bradley writes about the timeline:

http://markbradley.blog.ajc.com/2014/01/29/snowjam-2014-atlanta-at-its-absolute-worst/?icmp=ajc_internallink_textlink_homepage

Wildest thing to me is his iPhone traffic pic, an hour or so after the snow started falling:

 

I am not laughing at all about the snow, but does this local weatherman *really* have this kind of pull? I don't know who one local weatherman is in our local burg.

What are the show's ratings? 90%

 

Was snow here yesterday, no ice at all.

A tale of two counties: Cobb schools decided to dismiss at 1pm, right when the snow was falling the hardest and people at work were starting to get antsy. That put everyone on their roads at the same time.

Gwinnett County schools stayed in session.

I was at lunch in Cobb County at 1:20. Began to make my way back to the office but multiple side street options were completely gridlocked.

Began to make my way east on 285 to Gwinnett. Got to I-85 north and was going 40 mph most of the way home. The snow wasn't the issue.

 

We don't screw around with snow plowing

 

Having recently moved to a state in the South, I learned that getting a lot of snow was a rare thing, but it was not unusual to get freezing rain.

The latter would tell me that having a salting truck would be a good thing for every city, because salting the roads does a lot more to help than just sanding, and roads aren't as slick (although you still have to be careful).

Not that it would have helped alleviate the situation in Atlanta. As others have said, the biggest factor was the massive amount of traffic.

 

And for a sporting tie-in, both the Hawks and Georgia Tech have home games scheduled for tonight.

 

Hawks postponed:

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/eye-on-basketball/24423704/wednesdays-hawks-pistons-game-has-been-postponed-weather