Well that was fun (Southern snow edition)

[JonInMiddleGA]

2 inches of snow in Athens, GA = excited 10 y/o , fun to take pics of
4 inches of snow in Athens, GA = still happy, still fun
4 inches of snow in Athens, GA & the power goes off = not nearly so much fun
6 inches of snow in Athens with no power = Okay, this isn't fun anymore

6 inches of snow in Athens, GA, no power for 32 hours and temps expected to be 22 degrees, me with minimal coffee during said 32 hours, no internet access, one working cellphone, and a 10 y/o, 2 cats, and a wife going slowly stir crazy = This better end soon or it may not end well.

Happily, power restored about 11pm Monday. Limbs everywhere, virtually every tree in my yard lost at least something, other neighbors got it worse than me.

Finally managed to get enough ice off the driveway around 4pm so we could get out for a little while (long enough to fill a jumbo coffee urn & a spare thermos) before it iced back over.

You wanna know the funny part? I figure I'll make a pot of coffee tonight just in case the power restoration is temporary ... I had barely enough to make a pot. In all the hoohah of yesterday, I guess I had forgotten that I needed to make a trip to the store to get more coffee.

[Lathum]

this is funny

[Logan]

4 inches of snow knocks out the power? Good lord.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Logan

4 inches of snow knocks out the power? Good lord.

Somewhere between the 4th & 5 inches, over half the homes in the county lost power, most were still not back up until tonight if then. Neighboring counties got it just as bad or worse & weren't having much more luck. One of the differences is the trees I think, they simply aren't used to that sort of stress. I dread thinking about our own cleanup, I'd guess between $500 & $1000 just in the labor of clearing the debris if I use my regular helper, Lord only knows what replacement would cost (and it won't be happening). Even if 40,000 households had just $100 each in cleanup, that's $4 million dollars from that alone, never mind the replacement cost of that much vegetation.

Another is the preparation I'm sure, this was the first snow accumlation I've seen in over five years, only the second time in more than ten years. It happens so infrequently here that it's simply isn't practical to have that kind of manpower on hand until it goes to hell. The logistics just aren't cut out for this sort of thing, case in point, over 200 streets (neighborhoods, not main roads) were impassable around 10 this morning, Athens-Clarke County had managed to scrape together 3 work crews to clear that up. I'm not sure how many crews they could have managed without the ice but a lot of the workers simply couldn't get out of their neighborhoods to get to work in the first place. Emergency transportation meanwhile has their hands full with trying to get doctors to work & the like. We've got five doctors in the neighborhood here, not a one of them drove themselves to work, would have just ended up in a ditch trying like so many other people did. That provided one of the more interesting moments of the past couple of days, as we watched the kidney specialist down the street, a native of India I believe, try to carefully make his way up the steep street over/through/around the trees & limbs that were everywhere while trying to walk on a solid sheet of ice. Something about this very meticulous looking man in his cashmere coat trying to maneuver through that was almost surreal. As his 20-something son put it, "we've never seen anything like this & I hope we never do again".

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by Logan

4 inches of snow knocks out the power? Good lord.

yeah, once you get to certain parts of the country a dusting will shut everything down.

It's not like the NE

[Buccaneer]

Originally Posted by Lathum

yeah, once you get to certain parts of the country a dusting will shut everything down.

It's not like the NE

Or the mountains here in the West, where 4 inches of snow would be considered a nice, passing storm in June.

[Swaggs]

Wow... I bet your son will remember this for a long time.

Snow is pretty fun in small doses. I kind of missed it when I lived in North Carolina, but after one Winter back in Northern West Virginia, I've had about enough to last me for the next ten years.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Some perspective on how unusual this is. At the official reading of 6.5 inches, it's the fifth largest snowfall in Athens since records going back to 1880. It's the most recorded since 1987 (and more than double what the area got during the blizzard in 1993) and may have been the most ever in some parts of the county as the state climatologist personally (but unofficially) recorded 8.9 inches in the southeastern part of the county and others marked up to 10 inches. For here, this wasn't just once in a decade snow, it's once in a century snow.

[sabotai]

We got 10 inches of snow today. That's about a once a year thing for us in Jersey.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by sabotai

We got 10 inches of snow today. That's about a once a year thing for us in Jersey.

Yep, it's absolutely normal in a lot of places. Here, it's like Snowmageddon.

[BishopMVP]

Originally Posted by Logan

4 inches of snow knocks out the power? Good lord.

When large parts of this state were without power last month, it wasn't a particularly deep snowstorm, it just happened to be an ice accumulation knocking down tree limbs. I haven't heard anything abnormal about life even with the 10-12 inches dropped the last 24 hours.

It does sound like pretty poor planning by the city if they didn't have crews/snow plows ready to go - the storm may have been a once in a century event, but at least some snowfall was forecast for a few days in advance. Make sure your cleanup crews are on site and ready to go. I know a lot of the power companies had crews from the southeast come up here to help out last month, so those companies know how to scamble workers and prepare.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by BishopMVP

When large parts of this state were without power last month, it wasn't a particularly deep snowstorm, it just happened to be an ice accumulation knocking down tree limbs. I haven't heard anything abnormal about life even with the 10-12 inches dropped the last 24 hours.

It does sound like pretty poor planning by the city if they didn't have crews/snow plows ready to go - the storm may have been a once in a century event, but at least some snowfall was forecast for a few days in advance. Make sure your cleanup crews are on site and ready to go. I know a lot of the power companies had crews from the southeast come up here to help out last month, so those companies know how to scamble workers and prepare.

Eh, I really do think they tried, but once the trees started going down most bets were off. And in fairness we did get more than double what was predicted. Pretty good gauge of the problem comes from the local police who recorded nearly 900 calls for service on Sunday, likely a single day record for them since they pointed out "we've never done 800 calls even on a football weekend".

Heck, I'll even grudgingly give Georgia Power their due for trying in spite of sitting through the longest power outage I've suffered across four different towns of every size in more than 20 years. They had 600 workers in the county by this afternoon, not sure how much more they could have done that than considering we weren't expected to be hit anywhere near this hard (and a city on the other side of the state got more than 5 inches themselves but had nowhere near the downed lines). And the two neighboring counties served by a different company, which would normally provide the most immediate help, had similar problems of their own so they were taken out of the loop as were the help they got from other utility companies.

It was just a day & a half where it kind of sucked to be us I guess.

[fantom1979]

Originally Posted by BishopMVP

It does sound like pretty poor planning by the city if they didn't have crews/snow plows ready to go - the storm may have been a once in a century event, but at least some snowfall was forecast for a few days in advance. Make sure your cleanup crews are on site and ready to go. I know a lot of the power companies had crews from the southeast come up here to help out last month, so those companies know how to scamble workers and prepare.

I have to be somewhat forgiving here. Where are they supposed to get the supplies from? Its not in the north where we have plows and salt fired up and ready to go starting in October. They probably don't even own a plow. Are you going to buy a dozen or so plows for one snow storm? You can prepare all the workers you want, if they don't have the tools, its really not going to matter.

[JonInMiddleGA]

At 2pm Sunday


At 4pm Sunday


At 6pm Sunday

[miked]

My dog had a blast yesterday as I'm sure she really didn't remember snow from last year. We got about 2 inches and our power went out Sunday night at 7pm (just as we were cooking dinner) and stayed out until 9am yesterday morning. It would be cool if it hadn't gotten to 48 degrees in the house.

I guess we could've gone to my mom's house in downtown Decatur, but she and my sister share a 2 bedroom condo and we weren't about to sleep on the couch. It was a little fun in a, reminds us of when we used to go camping, rustic sort of way, but then again annoying because the people next door to us (on the corner) had power.

I'm fairly certain the local Kroger/Publix had been looted for their entire supply of water, batteries, and other foodstuffs

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

(and more than double what the area got during the blizzard in 1993)

I am sure that I have been in many many larger snow storms since moving to Massachusetts.. however one of the most remembered snow storms I have been a part of was the 1993 snow when I still lived in Atlanta.

I remember that the roads completely shut down, and my mother and step father had just bought a house down near Hiram, GA but were out of town at their place down in the south (near Jasper). So I had to try to get from where I lived (in North east Cobb County) down to their place in Hiram to try to run some water so the pipes wouldn't freeze.

Needless to say, it was impossible for me to get there for another 2-3 days. By the time I got there, everything was starting to thaw and I walked in to a water fall in the living room. (for whatever reason the water pipes all ran in the ceiling and not in the floor). I'll always remember that storm

[sterlingice]

One of the tv stations in Richmond has a chat set up where you can see the weather studio and one of the guys was answering questions on and off for 3 or 4 hours yesterday afternoon while doing his other weather prep. We got 5" where I was at and some places even got over 10"- the last snowfall of this type was 6.5" in 2003, so it's been a while.

It didn't shut the city down, but 5" got every school for 50 miles in all directions closed and a lot of people were told to not come in to work yesterday unless it's an emergency (so I went out and played in the snow )

Frankly, since I didn't have to go anywhere, it was a fun and unexpected treat

SI

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

One of the differences is the trees I think, they simply aren't used to that sort of stress.

To my understanding, the trees are a major difference-maker in these sorts of storms, for three reasons:
1. In areas that get snow more often, the weaker limbs fall with more frequency, but in much smaller quantities. It was explained to me as just "pruning." In the Deep South, weaker limbs tend to hang around much longer until something comes along and stresses them, then they fall in mass quantities.
2. As rare as Deep Southern snow is, even more rare is Deep Southern snow that is not accompanied by at least some ice accumulation, and obviously the ice is much heavier on the trees and power lines.

Another is the preparation I'm sure, this was the first snow accumlation I've seen in over five years, only the second time in more than ten years. It happens so infrequently here that it's simply isn't practical to have that kind of manpower on hand until it goes to hell.

The only chance you'd have of taxpayers not going nuts if Southern cities and towns tried to buy enough snow equipment to clear the city in a timely fashion would be if the governing bodies bring it up right after a storm like this. Once reality sets in, people realize that this sort of thing just doesn't happen often enough to make it worth it. I'd say that it's better to just suck it up for a day or two and deal with it than spend money on equipment that might even break down from non-use for well over a decade.

I'm not sure how many crews they could have managed without the ice but a lot of the workers simply couldn't get out of their neighborhoods to get to work in the first place.

And yeah. Snow is one thing. Ice is another. As I said above, the temperature usually doesn't get cold enough for all-snow events. There's almost always ice involved on the roadways.

Originally Posted by Alan T

I am sure that I have been in many many larger snow storms since moving to Massachusetts.. however one of the most remembered snow storms I have been a part of was the 1993 snow when I still lived in Atlanta.

I remember that the roads completely shut down, and my mother and step father had just bought a house down near Hiram, GA but were out of town at their place down in the south (near Jasper). So I had to try to get from where I lived (in North east Cobb County) down to their place in Hiram to try to run some water so the pipes wouldn't freeze.

Needless to say, it was impossible for me to get there for another 2-3 days. By the time I got there, everything was starting to thaw and I walked in to a water fall in the living room. (for whatever reason the water pipes all ran in the ceiling and not in the floor). I'll always remember that storm

So will I. It was one of the most stressful events of my lifetime. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was a 24-year-old youth worker snowed in for 3ish days with a 15-year-old attractive female. A strange course of events caused this. I think I can still recall the chronology fairly well:

Early That Week: I was moving in to the basement apartment of the girl's family on the upcoming weekend, and the forecast called for rain on Friday night and Saturday, so I got some buddies scheduled to help me move my stuff Friday afternoon/early evening, before the rain would start.
Around Wednesday/Thursday That Week: Forecast was for rain changing to snow showers on Saturday, little/no accumulation in Atlanta-one to three inches in the N. GA mountains. The mom and dad who owner the house got excited about the snow, and rented a cabin near Jasper together so they could see it.
Friday Morning: Forecast still calls for "up to an inch" of snow in the A-T-L on Saturday morning, so plans remain the same: parents to the mountains, older daughter Corey (in early 20s at the time..was a YL leader with me and lived at home) would be in charge of the house for the weekend. Erin (the 15-yo) would go out with friends Friday night, and be driven home by a friend's dad. Corey makes plans to go out with friends in East Cobb Friday night, get home fairly late like Erin would, and then they'd hang out together on Saturday afternoon/evening.

Friday Afternoon/Early Evening. My move is completed. Some time during the move, buddies who helped me move and I say bye-bye to Erin, mom, and dad as mom and dad go to drop Erin off at friend's house and then head out of town.

Friday Early Evening. POURING cold rain starts. All rain. Forecast updated to say something like "1-2 inches of snow likely on Saturday morning in metro Atlanta."

Friday Mid-Evening. I buy pizza for the guys who helped move. We eat it in the basement apartment and watch a little basketball. (I think it was the first weekend of March madness. Corey (older daughter) comes down to say hi to everyone, and heads out for the evening. The guys leave fairly early.

Friday, Around 10pm. Tired from the move, I go to sleep. It's still raining very hard at this point.

Friday, some time between 10:30pm and 11pm, apparently. The very hard rain changes to very hard snow. The father who had dropped off Erin and her buddies to go bowling or whatever is paying attention, and goes immediately to pick all of the girls up and take them home. He drops Erin off. It never occurs to Erin that Corey won't be able to make it home. (This was 1993, mind you, so it was very rare for 15 and 21-ish year-olds to have mobile phones--even fairly wealthy ones like these girls, so there was no communication at that point between Corey and Erin, just an assumption.)

Friday, some time around midnight. Corey and several of her buddies, who had rented a couple of movies at someone's house in East Cobb (also a college kid who lived at home, but this gal lived in the basement...so no windows), emerge from the house to drive home and there's ice and snow all over the place by now, and there's no way she can make it home. She calls Erin in the main part of the house. Erin, a bit skittish about sleeping in that big ol' house all by herself, decides to come downstairs to the basement apartment and sleep on my couch. (I had a bedroom, a den, an eating area, and a kitchen down there. The den with the coach was right outside of my bedroom.)

Saturday , somewhere between 6am and 7am. I wake up, look outside the tiny window from my basement bed, see everything covered with snow, and it's still snowing HARD. Wanting to open the door to outside so I can see better, I open the bedroom door, still in my underwear, and take a couple of steps toward the door to outside...

...and at that point I notice that there's a 15-year-old girl asleep on my couch.

Fortunately, I didn't make enough noise to awaken her. (Thank God for small miracles.) I had no idea what she was doing there, mind you. As far as I knew, Corey was asleep upstairs. I went back in the bedroom, put some clothes on, and woke her up. She then explained about Corey being snowed in over in East Cobb and her being "scared" sleeping upstairs all by herself.

I told her that it would be more fun to go outside and play in the snow while it was still "fresh." So she got up and went upstairs to put some warm stuff on. When she went up there, I called up a female YL leader (Kathy) who lived in a neighborhood about a mile and a half away and said basically, "Uh, you need to walk over here. NOW!!!!!! HELP!!!!!" She wouldn't come over, so I convinced Erin that it would be fun to go and see Kathy, so we trudged down Powder-Springs Road in a driving snowstorm over to Kathy's house. Eventually Erin wanted to go home, and I didn't feel right about letting her walk out there alone. (The wind and driving snow were still *brutal* at this point.) So reluctantly I walked her home, and we hung out for maybe 3-4 hours alone in the house. Me=incredibly uncomfortable. Erin=completely oblivious that anything was awkward or inappropriate. But bless her soul, Kathy changed her mind after a short while and walked over and spent the night with us on Saturday *and* Sunday night. Erin's Mom and Dad were stuck in the mountains until like Wednesday, I think, and Corey didn't make it home until Monday afternoon.

Erin looked me up on Facebook a few months ago. We'd never really talked about it again. As I figured, she had no idea how completely uncomfortable I was with the whole situation. I've seen her parents over the years much more than I've seen her, and they always do the point-and-laugh thing at me about it. The mom once said it was worth getting snowed in for how much they have laughed about the story from my perspective.

[Passacaglia]

I just got to the minimal coffee part -- I bet ThinkGeek sells a coffeemaker with a USB cable that you could hook up to your laptop.

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

To my understanding, the trees are a major difference-maker in these sorts of storms, for three reasons:
1. In areas that get snow more often, the weaker limbs fall with more frequency, but in much smaller quantities. It was explained to me as just "pruning." In the Deep South, weaker limbs tend to hang around much longer until something comes along and stresses them, then they fall in mass quantities.
2. As rare as Deep Southern snow is, even more rare is Deep Southern snow that is not accompanied by at least some ice accumulation, and obviously the ice is much heavier on the trees and power lines.

I was going to post this, but Ben beat me to it. It's all about the trees not being "naturally" pruned.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Passacaglia

I just got to the minimal coffee part -- I bet ThinkGeek sells a coffeemaker with a USB cable that you could hook up to your laptop.

Wife's laptop even had a dead battery in this instance (won't hold a charge for crap) but I really like the spirit of the suggestion.

[flere-imsaho]

Well, you've got fallen tree branches, right?

1. Make a fire.
2. Boil water.
3. Steep coffee grounds.
4. Filter.
5. Enjoy the sweet, sweet nectar of caffeine.

[Passacaglia]

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

Wife's laptop even had a dead battery in this instance (won't hold a charge for crap) but I really like the spirit of the suggestion.

I hear ya. My laptop actually shuts off (no sleep mode or anything) immediately once unplugged. I really need to do something about that.

[Julio Riddols]

Its really hot here today.. It always strikes me as odd when one side of the country at virtually the same latitude can have 6 inches of snow and 22 degree temps, while the desert bakes like usual.

[gstelmack]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

The only chance you'd have of taxpayers not going nuts if Southern cities and towns tried to buy enough snow equipment to clear the city in a timely fashion would be if the governing bodies bring it up right after a storm like this. Once reality sets in, people realize that this sort of thing just doesn't happen often enough to make it worth it. I'd say that it's better to just suck it up for a day or two and deal with it than spend money on equipment that might even break down from non-use for well over a decade.

Cary usually hires some company from Michigan to come down when it decides to snow. I love my town!

But yes, it's usually the ice bringing down power lines. We're often right at that freezing mark, and where most places up north tend to get snowstorms, we often get rain/freezing rain/sleet/snow/sleet storms as the air goes from well above freezing to below while the front moves through. One of the big issues we had about a decade ago when we got around 20 inches of snow wasn't the 20 inches of snow, it was the inch or so of rain/freezing rain that fell first and froze UNDER the snow, which made it nigh on impossible to plow the roads. It took a few days of sun to clear out the ice to make road travel possible.

Another problem we had in this area with this storm (although fortunately the sun and temps cured it fairly quickly after it stopped snowing) was that we got an inch or two of rain that prevented them from getting the salt and brine solutions on the road to prevent black ice. That made roads really treacherous during the storm.

And of course the bad ones are when we don't get any snow at all, but instead just an inch or so of freezing rain that wreaks all kinds of havoc.

[BishopMVP]

Originally Posted by fantom1979

I have to be somewhat forgiving here. Where are they supposed to get the supplies from? Its not in the north where we have plows and salt fired up and ready to go starting in October. They probably don't even own a plow. Are you going to buy a dozen or so plows for one snow storm? You can prepare all the workers you want, if they don't have the tools, its really not going to matter.

I wasn't talking about supplies. I understand completely why its not economically feasible to prepare for once in a decade+ events like this by buying 20 snow plows. I was just responding to

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

The logistics just aren't cut out for this sort of thing, case in point, over 200 streets (neighborhoods, not main roads) were impassable around 10 this morning, Athens-Clarke County had managed to scrape together 3 work crews to clear that up. I'm not sure how many crews they could have managed without the ice but a lot of the workers simply couldn't get out of their neighborhoods to get to work in the first place. Emergency transportation meanwhile has their hands full with trying to get doctors to work & the like.

Like Jon said, the power company had 600 people out quickly to restore power - I'm sure they anticipated problems and had people ready to go before the storm. Up here, all towns will have the personnel on site with the equipment before a storm starts - so you don't end up with a situation where the work personnel are in their homes and unable to reach the plows/trucks. Sounds like the town of Athens dropped the ball there.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by BishopMVP

I'm sure they anticipated problems and had people ready to go before the storm.

Actually I'd say you're giving them too much credit. They didn't get in here in force until well into the day on Monday, with virtually no progress made at all in the first 24 hours of the event (started around noon Monday, stopped around midnight). There was no way for them to know where this would hit, so random was this that thirty minutes west of us (at higher elevations & with a much longer track record for being snowed/iced under) they had a dusting. I'm not going to rip on them too much since they put forth the effort required once they got on site but it's not as though they were sitting here ready to go either. Really no way for them to be because ...

Up here, all towns will have the personnel on site with the equipment before a storm starts - so you don't end up with a situation where the work personnel are in their homes and unable to reach the plows/trucks. Sounds like the town of Athens dropped the ball there.

As much as I'd like to bash our illustrious mayor & her little gang of leftists, a motley collection that seems to oppose virtually anything of value & desire to have all wealth stored in the county coffers & distributed as they see fit or at least as much of it as they can steal & waste without killing their re-election chances, I'll give her people in public works largely a pass on that score. (note: unrelated political rant there meant to illustrate that I'm definitely not prone to giving them the benefit of much doubt)

There was no expectation for this degree of storm, although the trucks were ready to go, salt & sand loaded, etc, and most of the workers who would have been on the cleanup crews during the day were driving those trucks overnight. That's normal prep for a 1-3 inch possibility & those guys were right where they were supposed to be but I wouldn't have really wanted them handling heavy equipment on no sleep at some point.

The rest, well, they had maybe a two hour window to reassess what was going to happen (even while the forecasters were all saying no more than 3 inches tops even while it was piling up) before it went from a minor event to a major mess. Normally storms like this stop short of Athens, getting basically stuck in the mountains to the west & playing out, or if they do reach here they sail through quickly before dropping their load on the higher elevations to our northeast. Instead, this one decide to sit right on top of us for about 12 hours, during most of which it was too late to do anything about workers who weren't already in the shop.

Meanwhile, the cleanup has started around the neighborhood, some folks are already finished, some of us haven't really even started. The thaw is about half & half, either no snow or still 3 inches, depending upon where the sun was hitting. I'm not feeling masochistic enough to go out & try to lug around the debris still frozen & covered in snow & most of my thawed areas are going to need the chainsaw ... which is in the back of my regular handyman's truck at the moment (he goes above & beyond for us regularly & we let him borrow some tools as needed for other jobs). Should be an oh-so-fun day for me about Thursday or Friday.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Just a little follow here as it appears the cleanup of the storm debris piles that have decorated the county since early March will be completed sometime just after Memorial Day.
Slow snowstorm cleanup frustrates | News | OnlineAthens.com