Right. I am from the South and live in New England now. It isn’t a matter of being used to snow driving or not. Most people can figure it out to some degree if pressed. The issue is how much pure ice is left on the roads. You can drive on snow in just about anything as long as you are careful but ice is a different story.
The South not only gets lots of ice when it gets cold, they also do not have any way of melting or removing it so it creates truly treacherous conditions that almost no one can drive in safely without special gear like studded tired or chains. One of the worst driving experiences I ever had was in a sleet storm in the Dallas area. I went as slow as I could and still ended up off the road more times than I could count. Brakes were useless on some stretches so you just went wherever inertia and gravity took you.
That happens occasionally in New England too but it isn’t typical. It is usually just snow with small ice patches but occasionally you will get a stretch of road that melts and then refreezes into black ice or just regular ice and you end up with a 40+ car pileup. One of those happened earlier this year and I don’t think it was all due to driver inexperience. There isn’t much you can do in those situations except get off the road as soon as possible when you recognize those conditions. Nobody can drive in them safely in a regular vehicle.
As to the mismanagement thing, that happened in the Boston area 6 or 7 years ago. A snow storm came in that was much bigger than forecast and all employers dumped their employees on the road at the same time in the early afternoon. The resulting gridlock and accidents made it impossible for the snow removal equipment to get through and the end result was the same as they just saw in Atlanta. People were stuck so long they ran out of gas on the major highways and had to abandon their cars and seek shelter overnight wherever they could. Thousands of people didn’t make it home for 12 - 16 hours and it took days to get the whole mess cleaned up.
I don’t make fun of anyone in any of those situations. The driving conditions are a lot worse than people are imagining and similar things can happen even in places where they get tons of snow when the conditions line up just right.
I too, live in Chicago (hi, pulykamell!), and I always had all-weather tires on my car, until I bought a RWD car (a Ford Mustang) a couple of years ago. I now have winter tires put on the rear wheels in the winter months.
I ran a snow removal crew for two active military runways, plus the base streets. We ran both a night and day crew during a storm. When the weather forecast was for nasties, I would put my people on their shift sleep cycles a day in advance and have the mechanics start cycling the blowers and plows, checking for any issues. At 2" accumulation, a shift was called in and we started pushing white stuff.
I can attest that it was hell even for people who live way outside of Atlanta - outside of the county even. Basically, the entirety of Fulton county (which includes some areas far from Atlanta) and all the surrounding areas were completely boned. So it was much more than simply failure by Atlanta, or even a couple counties. You couldn’t move in any direction.
^But why, exactly? All over the country, people drive just fine in a couple inches of snow. You go slowly, and occasionally some people slide or even go off the road, but things don’t just lock up. Was the snow quickly turning into ice, or were so many people sliding that they were blocking all the roads?
Here in Houston when the temps fall to just about freezing, it often rains balls of slush that like to freeze to each other. The ground is still warm here so we get cycles of freezing and melting and the surface quickly turns to glass. Imagine your town covered with a solid block of 2"/5cm ice, Zambonied to a shine and wetted down, plus we make our freeway interchanges very high and very steep so throw your freeway ramps 50’/15m into the air for a bonus.
I left Houston Tuesday about mid-day for Dallas as this was beginning in ernest. Icicles were forming off my roof and clumps of ice were sticking to the sidewalk. The air temp was about 35f/1.6c. It did not get bad here but I was sure glad to see blue sky as we hit the freeway.
This happens so rarely there is little point in worrying about it as we shall be in shorts weather in a few days. TPTB just throw sand and tell people to stay home.
The problem down here is Government is in a Catch-22 no matter what happens, make the right call or the wrong one, no one is going to be happy with you.
Yes, in Atlanta the precipitation WAS rapidly turned to ice. That was clear if you watched video of the mess.
Up here, over the past couple weeks, we’ve had enough people slide/spin/get stuck to temporarily block roads, but we also have people with the equipment and experience to untangle such roadblocks quickly and efficiently. Even so, when a road ices over they simple close it until it can be dealt with. A few weeks ago authorities told people in Porter county to simply not drive and were backing it up with $2,500 fines until conditions improved. This prevented people from inducing gridlock.
The Atlanta factos were:
letting everyone go to their cars at more or less the exact same time
drivers inexperienced with negotiating such conditions
lack of equipment/expertise in sufficient amounts to efficiently cope with the problems
I live just outside of Buffalo and will go back to an earlier point about salt. Driving out and about I go past a couple of towns Highway garages. I’ve seen the big salt sheds and they seem to have mountains of salt stored in them year round.
I’d invite all the thread watchers to take a look at St. Louis the next couple of days. Right now the weather service is forecasting snow just to the north and west of here, and slightly warmer temperatures and a “wintry mix” in the metro area. From a meteorologist’s standpoint, that’s saying the metro area could end up with rain, ice, sleet, snow, or all four.
As it stands right now, the highway departments are shifting resources north and west. If the forecast changes, they probably won’t have time to shift everything back to the metro area before things freeze.
Noting that Birmingham is about the same latitude as Atlanta and also experienced a very rapid freeze of participation and was also a clusterfuck. Birmingham thought they were getting dust and they got inches. But the two cities are pretty close to one another so I think it’s obviously logical that they both experienced similar difficulties.
The high the previous day was 60 degrees and hence the ground was relatively warm. The first snow flurries landed and melted. The temperature plummeted, the water turned to ice and we all saw the result.
