In case you haven’t heard, Georgia is closed.
Well, at least my hometown of Atlanta is closed.
And people are pissed. Yesterday was a scary day for a lot of people. My family was no stranger to that fear.
Luckily, my dad called my mom when the snow started and told her to get home. She said she left the university campus where she teaches around 1100. It’s only about 3 miles away from their house, but she managed to make it home with her car.
Most people weren’t that lucky.
She took the above picture of the puppy at 11:30 when she got home (she says he loves the snow). That’s an hour and a half before they closed down the university and the public schools in the area.
By the end of the day, it looked like this:
It doesn’t look that bad, does it?
Well, it doesn’t show the solid sheet of ice underneath.
Most people hear “two inches of snow and Atlanta shut down? That’s ridiculous.” Snow didn’t shut it down. Ice shut it down. The snow plows they have up in the north? The South doesn’t have those. They have salt trucks with plow attachments. And very few of those.
At the beginning of yesterday, my parents, who are north of Atlanta, were told to expect flurries. A half inch of snow at best. The “bad weather” was going to miss all of them and go to the North. Well, when it became apparent that wasn’t the case and schools and businesses finally shut down, it was too late. Ice was forming, the cars weren’t warming it enough, accidents were happening, and people were stuck.
My brother, an assistant wellness director at a YMCA in Marietta abandoned his car just after 1 pm, just a mile away from his branch. And he started walking. He walked almost 12 miles to get home in Woodstock, stopping along the way to warm up, buy more layers, and recover from a few falls. It was dark by the time he made it home, but he made it home (we were all terrified something would happen to him during that hike–all it would take is one small patch of ice, an out of control car, and he could have been toast).
He was lucky.
Children were stuck at school. They were stuck on stranded school buses. Their parents couldn’t get to them, they had no food, no heat.
I had friends whose 45 minute commutes home took them 8 hours. I had friends who were stranded for 10 hours with their small children. I had friends who were unable to get to their children at school. I had friends spend the night in grocery stores. Or in their cars.
But I also had friends who opened up their homes to people who couldn’t get home. And friends who took out sandwiches and hot chocolate to those who were stuck in their cars. And friends who offered up their bathrooms and phones to complete strangers.
My facebook feed was filled with “I have a bed” or “I have a couch.” And pictures of people hauling school buses out of ditches with their truck winches. And pictures of gridlock. Of accidents. Of completely blocked roads and interstates.
This morning at my biopsy appointment, they had CNN on in the waiting room. Kyra Phillips was reporting, and she was pissed. Everyone is pissed. There is a lot of finger pointing and blame going around, but aside from hiring psychics, I don’t know that there was anything anyone could have done differently other than to shut down at the simple threat of snow. From now on, I predict that any snow-flurry talk on the weather channel will result in snow days for everyone. For at least the next ten years.
We haven’t gotten any winter weather here in WA this year. We didn’t get any last year, either. But we did in January 2012. JBLM was shut down, people were without electricity, and ice covered the roads. WA is just about as poorly equipped for winter weather as GA is–the precipitation keeps it warm enough, most of the time, and the worst of winter here really does resemble winter in The South. But people here weren’t trapped on the side of the road for 12 hours. They weren’t running out of gas trying to get home. Their children weren’t stranded at school.
They were just freezing in their own homes.
To those at Fort Drum or one of the bases in Alaska or North Dakota, 2 inches of snow in Atlanta or JBLM shutting down the entire city sounds like a joke. But when it’s unexpected and your community is unprepared, it can lead to very scary times.
To all of our friends and family in GA–please stay safe and warm!
