An unforgettable day

This post is going to be more facts/information than fun or entertainment.  

Those of us down here in Atlanta know something.  We know we were the butt of America's jokes last Tuesday when Snowcopalypse 2014 hit us.  Y'all, there was nothing funny about what Atlanta went through last week.  People were in very dire and dangerous situations. 

I get it.  How can less than 3 inches of snow close down a city and cause the chaos that happened here?

It was a combination of things.  I don't think you can blame it on any one person or any one thing. Schools, businesses and government offices all left at the same time and the streets were clogged.  I was surprised the schools were open in the first place.  They normally stay closed if one snow flurry falls or if there is the threat of one snowflake coming.  The few salt/sand trucks we have could not treat the roads because of the massive gridlock.  Some people have asked why they didn't treat the roads ahead of the storm.  I've heard some people say if they had, the cars driving on all of those roads during the morning commute would have blown most of the salt/sand away.  I'm not an expert on that kind of thing so I have no idea.  All of the cars that hit the roads at the same time melted and compacted the snow.  And the temps were falling so it all turned to a solid sheet of ice.  Atlanta is full of hills.  I don't care if you grew up in Alaska - it's impossible to drive on an icy hill without snow tires which we don't have down here.  Well, you can drive down an icy hill fine.  Stopping tends to be a bit of a problem though.  Atlanta has TONS of 18-wheeler traffic.  There are laws that they cannot come inside the perimeter (an interstate that goes around the city) unless they have documentation proving they have deliveries or pickups inside.  But a lot of truckers break that law.  Truckers are required to have chains for their tires when they come here.  But from what I understand, the officials don't enforce them actually putting them on.  So a lot of trucks jack-knifed or got sideways in the roads and no one could get around them.  In other words, there are a number of things you can blame for what happened last week.

However, I will say that (in my opinion) the mayor of the City of Atlanta was getting a ton of the blame that he did not deserve.  I work in the city limits and live in the city limits.  It took me 2 hours to get home for my 8 mile commute.  On an average day it takes me an hour because traffic here sucks on a sunny day with no weather situations occurring.  I spent over 30 minutes just trying to get out of my parking deck because everyone left my building at the same time.  So in reality, it only took me 30 minutes longer than my normal commute time (and that has happened before when there was no bad weather going on).  The people who were in their cars for 12 - 24 hours driving, who sat on the roads stranded, who slept in stranger's homes, in the floors of grocery stores, drug stores or Home Depots, etc. were people trying to get out to the burbs.  I have not personally heard of anyone who works and lives in the actual City of Atlanta who experienced the chaos that we all know was going on outside the city limits.  I'm not saying it didn't happen to anyone, but I have not heard about it if it did.  The only problem I know of personally within the city limits is a friend of mine who has a child that had to spend the night at school.  But her child was safe, she wasn't sitting on a bus, she was fed, she had access to restrooms, they watched movies, etc.  Was it ideal for her child to be away from her overnight sleeping at school?  Of course not.  But she was not in danger like a lot of people were that night. 

There were people stranded without medications.  Babies in cold cars without enough formula, diapers, etc.  Children stuck on school buses with no food, water or restrooms.  People abandoning their cars and walking miles in ice and snow with temperatures in the teens.  A baby was born in a car on the side of the expressway because the parents had been stuck in traffic for hours and emergency vehicles could not get to them.  There was a teenage girl who was trying to push her grandmother's car which was stuck in the ice.  Another car came sliding on the ice and the girl couldn't get out of the way.  Her leg was amputated.  Another woman was killed when her car slid into a ditch.  And we heard on TV and read on the internet about how people around the country were laughing at us.

I realize how blessed I was and you have no idea how grateful I am.  But the mayor of the City of Atlanta should not be taking the entire blame for people who were stranded miles outside the city limits.  He is not responsible for those roads.  And he had his hands full with the City of Atlanta.

What many people around the country don't realize is just how big metropolitan Atlanta is.  Some people say it consists of 10 counties.  Some say it's 28 counties.  There are approximately 160+ cities within those counties in the metropolitan area.  But most people will agree the metro Atlanta area is ginormous and we have a whole bunch of people here.  I've seen articles that say that metro Atlanta is the size of the state of Massachusetts.  In fact, I just Googled "population of Atlanta"  and a box popped up that says the population of our metro area is larger than 24 individual states. 

Metropolitan Atlanta and the City of Atlanta are not the same.  The actual City of Atlanta has a population of less than 500,000 people.  But during the workday, there are over a million people in the city.  And the mayor of the City of Atlanta has nothing to do with the interstates y'all saw pictures of last week.  Yet you would not know that by a lot of the coverage I saw.  Each county has officials.  Each city within those counties has officials.  And no one is in charge of overseeing the entire region.  That is where a lot of the problem came from, I think.  Everyone is doing their own thing and not coordinating anything.  And what that resulted in was the citizens all being left to fend for themselves.

I don't work for the government so I have no inside information, but I read that the last time we had an ice storm back in 2011, the city had 4 snow plows.  Two of them ran into each other as they were pulling out of a parking lot and reduced our snow plows in half.  I've also heard we had 10 plows.  I don't know what the actual number was.  They did purchase more, but it's still not many.  We have tons of streets and roads and interstates here.  Because we don't get this kind of weather on a regular basis, it makes no sense financially to buy tons of equipment that might sit around for years between use and they would not have the personnel on hand to operate them anyway.  So as Atlantans, we have to accept that we might get shut down every few years for a day or more due to ice.  The protocol is that they treat streets in front of fire stations, police stations, and hospitals.  They treat one or two lanes of the interstates (we have interstates that are as many as 8 lanes in each direction in some areas and they are packed on a normal day with no ice or snow).  And next they treat major roads.  Side streets where the majority of people live?  Those are not treated.  In fact, the street I live on is a pretty heavily traveled side street.  It is used a lot by emergency vehicles as a cut through so I thought there was a possibility my street would be treated (this is the first winter weather event we've had since I bought my house 2 years ago so I wasn't sure).  We saw sand/salt trucks going up and down our street last week to treat the major roads on each end of our street.  But they didn't drop a teaspoon of salt/sand on my street.  That's just part of life down here.

As for personal stories of people I know?  I've heard some doozies. 

One of my co-workers had to stay in the office for a client meeting/closing.  By the time it was over, the streets were impassable out towards where she lived because of the ice and gridlock.  Ten people slept in our office.  The clients were from out of town and had previously booked a hotel room across the street and they were lucky.  There was a poultry convention here in town and my co-workers were unable to find a room anywhere.  So they slept in the office.  Ideal?  No.  But they were warm, safe, we have a beer machine, vending machines, the attorney in charge of the closing had ordered a case of wine from a private club located in our building, etc.

Two of my co-workers slept overnight in a restaurant.  One of them decided she was just not going to be able to get home so she pulled into a shopping center and decided to go in the restaurant to warm up a little bit.  She saw another co-worker already in there and they ended up staying all night.  The restaurant fed them for free.  There was a couple in there with a 3-month-old baby named Luke.  Everyone there knew Luke and entertained Luke before the ordeal was over.  My co-workers left our office at noon on Tuesday.  They finally got home around 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday.

Another friend of mine left our office at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday.  She arrived home at 12:43 a.m. on Wednesday completely stressed and exhausted.

Another friend of mine left our office at noon.  It took her 13 hours to get home.  She came very close to running out of gas but miraculously made it up an exit ramp around many abandoned cars, cars that couldn't get up the ramp because of the ice, cars that had simply run out of gas.  Before she made it to the gas station, she had used a big cup and an old t-shirt in her car in lieu of a restroom.  I heard many similar stories.

One of our partners had been down in Orlando.  The airline emailed him on Tuesday to let him know his flight to Atlanta had been canceled.  They emailed him again and said they were re-routing him to LaGuardia and then to Atlanta.  Then they canceled that.  They emailed him again and said they were sending him from Orlando to Minneapolis to La Guardia to Atlanta.  He decided to rent a car and try to drive.  He got as far as Macon which is south of Atlanta and the state patrol had the roads closed.  They were not allowing anyone to drive into the Atlanta area because things were so awful here.  So he spent the night in Macon and got to Atlanta the next afternoon.

But in the midst of chaos, the beautiful human spirit shined.  People gave total strangers a ride when they needed one.  People let complete strangers spend the night in their homes.  People stood out on the streets handing out sandwiches, hot chocolate, granola bars, bottled water, etc. that they prepared in their homes to people who had been stranded in the cars overnight.  Home Depots opened their doors along with Publix, Kroger, CVS, Walgreens, etc.  Was sleeping on the floor of a grocery store fun?  I would suspect it was fairly miserable but at least they had access to restrooms, food, water, and warmth.  Pharmacists got life saving medications to people who were stuck away from home without them.  Ambulances carried high school students off a school bus to a Kroger grocery store.  The manager allowed them to help themselves to anything they wanted to eat and drink for free.  Some bus drivers spent 16 hours or more trying to get kids safely home.  And then they had long drives to get to their own homes after that.  Neighbors helped neighbors.  Strangers helped strangers.  New friendships were formed.

So yes, we know a lot of the country was laughing at us, shaking their heads, calling us imbeciles and dumbasses.  But I assure you there was nothing funny happening.  People struggled.  People cried.  People suffered.  I was blessed and I know it.  I made it home safely and in a relatively short time. 

It is a day Atlantans will never forget.