Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben E Lou
I guess I'm starting to wonder--especially given that graphic of the roads become gridlocked SO quickly--if there's even more blame on the forecasting/adjusting the forecast side of things. For those not as familiar with Georgia/Atlanta geopolitics, the counties are--compared to pretty much everywhere else in the country--extremely small. (I think Georgia has the 2nd-most counties of any state in the country and it's near the middle of the pack in square miles.) Point being, it's not like we're talking about "the Atlanta school system" or "the Atlanta city government" made decisions that impacted all of these people at one time. This looks like a case where a bunch of business and 10-15 city and county school systems all made the same decision at roughly the same time. To me--and I realize I'm guessing here--that would seem to point to them getting their information from the same source. I'm picturing the NWS in Peachtree City continually saying "no..this is gonna go away..don't worry...this is gonna go away..don't worry" and the respective school systems all listening to them until it was too late.
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Hmm, I dunno. I mean, let's really break down where things were the worst.
School systems that had major issues look to be Cherokee (where the snow was heavy by 10-1030 but they waited another couple hours to start moving kids), Cobb, Bartow, Gordon (less severe), with scattered issues in Fulton & Atlanta City. Other than that the problems seemed to have been more isolated - like one bus here or there - and subject to some bad luck. Ben will understand that right off but for the rest, that's four counties to the northwest of Atlanta by 30-90 minutes plus two that are more central / "Inside The Perimeter".
Aside from those systems, pretty much everyone else seemed to read & react relatively okay. Pickens, Gilmer, Fannin (east/northeast of those badly troubled four) all pretty much got kids home. Gwinnett (huge system to the northeast) for example, did not dismiss early at all & yet had no problems I've seen mentioned. Point being, they were able to read the data accurately & make a good decision.
As for the employers, yeah, there were some bad calls there it appears. For example last night I watched updates until 1am as a friend's dad FINALLY made it home from Lockheed (in Cobb) to Pickens County ... only took the van pool about 13 hours to make a 60-90 minute trip. Standard travel times for 1 hour trips seemed to be about 6-7 hours for everybody using the major interstates (75, 85, 285 ... or even major highway like 400). The NE side of the perimeter seemed to react especially poorly yesterday, tons of Roswell/Alpharetta travelers going nowhere fast.
Did the DOT respond appropriately? Still too early to say for sure IMO, although the reports of completely stand stills on the south end perimeter (285) without anyone seeing a single helpful vehicle of any kind for 3-4 hours could suggest some allocation of resources problems (that area was projected to get hammered pretty good all along). Certainly an inauspicious start for the procedures that were just revised after a similar snow/ice jam two years ago. I believe we'll hear a lot more about pre-treating programs in the weeks & months to come, those were supposed to be ramped up considerably but it's still uncertain whether they were poorly planned/executed or if they simply failed miserably.