I live in Chicagoland. Drive a Mustang GT - just about one of the worst possible vehicles for snow. I should get snow tires but that would be about $1000. Which I don’t want to spend. We get lots of snow every year but I manage. Only had to get towed once in the 7 years I’ve owned this car, and it was New Year’s Eve 2013, just a month ago.
Snow tires are great, but not absolutely necessary. Especially for 2 inches of snow. And I’ve lived in the north midwest (Chicago, Madison) my whole life.
Having just lived through it (and had to walk to and from work a couple times, which was… fun), I can say it was no party. I’m from a more snowbound climate, but this turned to ice very quickly and paralyzed the roads. Part of it was density, part of it was the ice, and part of it was the fact that nobody down here has snow equipment. I’d be surprised it there were 10 salt trucks in Fulton county and all the surrounding counties combined. Of course, people weren’t prepared - but then, a sizable fraction of the population here has likely never driven in icy conditions before, so it’s going to cause issues. But the damage was really done in a very short time - it’s took about three hours to completely wreck the entire transit system - so that there wasn’t a lot of time to fix things once they started going wrong.
The National Weather Service issued its first storm warning almost eight hours before the storm began. There was plenty of time for local/state government officials to make decisions and issue warnings long before the early morning commute. They chose not to do that.
An early TV interview of the Georgia governor reported the governor chose not to muster state resources because he did not want to negatively impact his state’s businesses. Apparently the storm disaster is minimal in his eyes compared to preparing his own state.
The first clear-all-traffic type blizzard I had was Northern IN in 72 or 73.
I had a VW bug with snow tires. The bug has a pan underbelly. As long as the pan could clear the snow, that puppy moved. And I suspect the front bumper got wet on occasion.
The last (how I hope it is the last) blizzard (91) I was driving a FWD. It made it through.
Both cases: the engine was over the driving wheels.
For those who are just learning about driving on frozen water.
And you might want to find snow chains and practice installing them - you go no faster than about 10 mph, but you go.
I go back and forth between Chicago and North Texas a lot, so I get to compare approaches. The big difference to not overlook is snow vs. ice. Places like Minneapolis and Chicago almost never get ice storms. They only get snow storms, and usually at a temperature where it stays snow and doesn’t thaw and refreeze into ice. From St. Louis south they often get pure ice, which is a completely different beast. I’ve been in ice storms in North Texas where I couldn’t even walk-skate across a street that had a slight slope; I finally had to crawl across on all fours. Imagine driving on that.
Besides the question of equipment reserves, some places are very reluctant to use salt because of the harm it does to roads and viaducts (rusting rebar and other steel). Here in Chicago we salt the hell out of things because a mayor once failed to get re-elected over not clearing a snowstorm. But Wisconsin cities aren’t so quick to use it, preferring sand, and it seems to be statewide policy in places like Texas to not even have any available.
I don’t fault anyone for failing to react to the storm warning. Occasionally there are winter storm warnings where they close everything, and then nary a snowflake falls. Parents and employees scream blue murder because “how could you disrupt my schedule for a non-event?” (I know, I’m one of those parents). Even the day before, local forecasters were calling for the storm to hit south of town. I didn’t expect to see a flake on the northside where I live.
I don’t think we’ll find money for an army of snow removal machines that will remain idle for 99% of their lifespan, but maybe we can learn to eat the cost of the occasional unnecessary school & business closure.
I’m 400 miles north of Chicago, live in an area where 200" of snow isn’t uncommon, and I’ve never had snow tires on my car. We go with all-weather tires, they do just fine.
I do know people who have snow tires, but not very many. All-weathers work in the snow.
And the schools messed up as well. Here in southern North Carolina they cancelled school for Tuesday and Wednesday on Monday afternoon, with the temperatures in the 60’s. On Tuesday afternoon with the ice storm in full swing all the kiddies were safe at home.
Atlanta kids went to school on Tuesday morning, then were released early, with no bus service. So instead of 40 kids on one school bus, you had 40 parents on the road trying to get their kids from school to home. Multiply this by 50 buses per school and dozens of schools in Atlanta and you don’t have to wonder why they gridlocked.
A lot of people look at a situation like Atlanta and say, “Look at all those morons who don’t know how to drive in the snow.”
It’s not that simple, though. We have our morons in the north too. And when there’s bad snow & ice, I’d guess about 1% of drivers don’t know how to handle it, even in the north. That 1% can cause accidents and major traffic problems. During rush hour, it can be crippling, even in the north.
Now imagine this happens in the south, where instead of 1% of drivers turning into idiots, 3% of them are losing control. And on top of this, the roads are already at capacity during rush hour when weather is perfect. Traffic is pretty bad in ATL, after all. I think the lack of preparation/salting/plowing issue is quite secondary – we have lots of times in northern cities where people are driving on completely untreated roads.
I’m in Minneapolis (where it’s currently getting hammered with snow this morning) and I could go out and count on one hand the number of cars with snow tires in our parking lot (a couple hundred cars). I’ve driven in Milwaukee for 9 years and Minneapolis for 12 and never owned snow tires. 17 of those years were FWD vehicles. I got around fine like everyone else.
TxDOT and the local cities and counties (above a certain size, I suppose) have plenty of sand available, and tend to use primarily on overpasses and bridges that freeze before normal roads.
We tend to have the biggest problems when we get ice/snow after it’s been cold enough that it sticks on normal roads. We generally don’t have the capacity to sand every road in that situation.
But… we do pay close attention to the weather alerts and everyone’s paranoid enough about it that the schools and workplaces generally err on the side of caution. That’s probably 90% of why we haven’t had the sort of problems they’re having near Atlanta with people stuck in cars, schools, offices, etc… We do have problems with falling ice though, there was a lot of damage to houses and cars back in December when the ice sheets came sliding off buildiings.
In the case of the Super Bowl ice a few years back, one of the big problems was the double-dip snow following the ice, and the fact that the temp didn’t actually get above freezing until the Tuesday or so after the game (we had nearly a week below freezing, IIRC).
I think it would be a poor economic decision, on the part of Southern cities, to keep sufficient supply of salt trucks and snow plows available – that’s gas, tires, wear and tear/repairs, and people to operate them. There has to be a plan with regard to how you go about clearing roads. Up North, they’ve been doing this forever, plans are in place, etc. But municipal budgets are tight as it is, so why would a city go further into debt to prepare for a weather event that might only happen every 20-30 years or so?
In comparison, Hurricane Sandy was a Cat. 1 storm – something that most coastal Southerners wouldn’t even get out of bed for. Yet it devastated the Eastern Seaboard because in New Jersey, they are not accustomed to getting that type of storm, that strongly, very often. It doesn’t happen often enough to justify the gear and equipment needed to carry out the emergency plan.
Now, with this particular situation, add in the other factors that people have already mentioned here: inexperienced drivers, closing decisions being made too late, forecasts not entirely accurate (we thought there would be a light dusting, not 2-3 inches), and you have a perfect recipe for what happened this week.
True story and possibly pointless anecdote:
Back in the mid-90s, I was living in South Carolina and had to drive to Ohio in February for some corporate training. I knew there was a winter storm coming – I had tuned into the weather reports. It sounded like the Carolinas were going to get 2-4 inches of snow. All I had to do, I knew, was make it far enough north where they have snowplows and salt trucks and I knew I’d be good to go.
I didn’t make it.
I made it to just about 30 minutes south of the NC-VA border. By then, I was driving in ice ruts, hearing the snow and ice scrape on the bottom of my car as I drove – I was on I-77. Visibility was very poor and my windshield kept icing up. So I got off the road, found a crappy hotel and holed up to wait until the roads were clear. I-77 was closed about an hour later, from NC up through WVA.
I was stuck there for three days.
When I-77 finally opened back up and I managed to get back out on the road, it was still pretty damn treacherous until I crossed the WVA border. Suddenly, the roads were clear and salted and dry and I was able to mash down on the gas and make some time. I would have thought that, even in the Smokey Mountains, they would be prepared to deal with snow and ice, but nope. It’s not cost-effective if you only have to trot that stuff out once a generation or so.
A few comments:
Snow tires are a huge hassle that isn’t really necessary anymore. I’ve lived in MN for 40 years and never used them nor known anyone that did. But the vehicle fleet is different. You don’t have a lot of rear-wheel drive vehicles with bald tires, you have more front/all wheel drive cars, more 4WD/AWD pickups / SUVs that have bigger tires, more ground clearance, etc, and people know how to drive in the snow.
Mobilizing personal would not be a problem. They don’t go out an hire a bunch of temporary plow drivers when they expect the first snow, the people driving plows in the winter are normally employees that are patching potholes or mowing grass in the summer so it’s just a matter of pulling them from whatever else they’re doing and pay them overtime for driving plows.
The north owns a lot more equipment. Some of the bridges are even equipped with automatic de-icers so someone just has to flip a switch at headquarters.
The map you link to clearly shows Montreal in the 40 mm or 1 1/2 inch category. Which is way more than enough for crisis. Rochester’s ice storm of 1991 was just as bad, knocked out power for at least a week and in many places two or three, and was worse than Sandy was to New York. For some reason it didn’t get as much attention.
Well, I used to drive with all-weathers too and thought they were fine. Until I switched. Then I realized that there was a better category.
There’s a lot of luxury items like this. You say to yourself, “Why the heck should I pay the extra money when I always… Oooh, now I see.”
I once had a VW bug and I got chains from the dealer. Dealer said they never sold any chains before, so they were glad to get rid of the only set they had. With those on, my bug was unstoppable. I once pushed a Caddy out of a snowbank.
Please tell me it was at least a Cat 3, or some sort of Ike-style storm where the storm surge was Cat 4, but the winds were Cat 2.
Cat 1 storms aren’t really much different than a garden-variety tropical storm- keep your trees trimmed, and you should be ok. That, and don’t build shit ON the beach; that’s stupid no matter where you live if you have the possibility of hurricanes. Most of the horrible destruction photos from Ike were from areas where knuckleheads did exactly that- built stuff on the beach with no protection from wind or waves. People in the Galveston area should have learned their lesson about that in oh… 1900 or so.
Here in Eastern Tennessee, we got about 5 inches of really dry snow. The kind that squeaks when you walk on it and is utterly useless to make a snowman or anything like that. The SO and I just went up to the highway and were able to make it just fine with our Avalon’s overdrive (AWD). Our little backroad is still covered in snow but NOT ice. The main road and the highway were completely clear. They do a really great job of getting the roads up and running for such a small rural area.
And so, even though I live in the wilds of East Tennessee, I am better off than I would have been if I still lived in Atlanta.
Nope.
It started out a Cat. 3, then it made landfall in Cuba and weakened. It went out into the Atlantic and intensified again, just barely making it back into Cat. 3 territory, and then weakened again before it made landfall in New Jersey – winds were 80 mph at landfall. That’s a Cat. 1 storm.
From here.
Even saying that it’s stupid to build on the beach is oversimplifying. What if there’s wetlands between the beach and the open ocean? That changes a lot. Anyway. No. Sandy was a Category 1 when it hit New Jersey. We wouldn’t have even had early release from schools in Florida for that. Hell, I drove to see a concert in the middle of a tropical storm once.
My point being: Most areas are prepared and equipped to handle the weather events that are most common and typical for that location. I will note that what happened in Atlanta was especially a clusterfuck due to poor decisions on the part of city emergency officials. However, this storm went through pretty much all of the deep South and you don’t hear Charlotte or Mobile, Alabama crying about gridlock, do you? IMO, traffic in Atlanta is always a clusterfuck and a crap shoot, storm or no storm.
My brother is in Birmingham AL and the place was pretty much shut down.
It wasn’t the winds or rain that were the problem with Sandy. It was the surge and the flooding ( which happened because a late tropical storm met up with a nor’easter at high tide during a full moon, IIRC) and a separate nor’easter with significant snowfall a week or so later. It wasn’t a Cat 3 storm , but neither was it an ordinary Cat 1. I’m sure you did drive to a concert in the middle of a tropical storm , but somehow I think Florida would have closed some schools if the Intracoastal Waterway had met the ocean regardless of the wind speed.
Some weather events are impossible to prepare for. Even though NYC is used to snow, people still get stuck in their cars . It’s not as many, but that’s because we mostly stay off the road.