I left town as soon as the snow started to stick and made it 32 miles home by 2:30. Some people have not made it home yet, 7 hours later. Kids are still at schools or in gridlocked school buses. Every highway is gridlocked with accidents and ice. A nasty blend of black and crusty ice on the roads. Atlanta ice is no joke!
I suppose when you're not used it, I remember being in Florida in 86 when there was snow in Sarasota. In month 3 of it here :(
That's a normal Jan/Feb afternoon in New England.
Minus 50% of the accidents perhaps.
But seriously, black ice sucks.
i drove through atlanta after an ice storm back around 2000. there were cars abandoned everywhere in the ditches and smashed into the barriers. by the time i got there the left lane on 75 was slush and the rest were clear. traffic was going 30 and nobody was in the left lane except me, with my northern rustbucket truck on snow tires, going the speed limit past all of them. it was the quickest i've ever made it through atlanta during daylight hours.
Conditions have been like that in Delaware for the better part of January.
I lived in Sandy Springs during that ice storm. I had an 88 Alfa Spider. Drove right past a pick up trying to get uphill out of the apartment complex. Myself and 3 others got to work at Ellis VW in Chamblee. All northerners!
Yep, Drove my 91 Saab 900 from Jim Ellis Chevy to Loganville. Smoooooth sailing.BUT THAT WAS BEFORE THE ICE. No, you cannot drive on ice. Snow, yep. Ice, Nope. Unless you are an ice racer on studs...This is the only forum in the world where there probably are such folk lurking.
ls1fiero wrote: No, you cannot drive on ice. Snow, yep. Ice, Nope.
You can drive on ice at reasonable speeds with modern winter tires.
In reply to MCarp22: Agreed.
Otherwise I wouldnt have been at work the past 2 weeks. It has been below 15 degrees here for days and we keep getting snow. Before that it rained and turned to ice.
Salt doesn't work when it is this cold.
People in the south can't drive bla bla bla......the point is that the weather turned to E36 M3, people were unprepared/didn't know what to do and now things are bad. You can't tell me that a second grader who has been on a bus for five hours is to blame for his predicament.
Not saying that at all. It sucks.
I lived in SC for a few years and it was mind blowingly bad when it would freeze. If you are not used to a certain type of event, it can be life threatening!
It would be similar if we had earthquakes or a hurricane in western PA. Everybody woudl freak out and not know how to handle it. People in CA (earthquakes) or people in the south coast (hurricanes) would laugh and tell us we are Bob Costas.
it does suck.
Wasn't trying to comment about that. Just commenting that it is possible to drive in super crappy conditions. Some places it is a necessity.
Rob R.
People in the south just don't have the right tires. Everyone I know in Atlanta has one set of tires, and they're always SUMMER tires, not all-seasons. Summer tires in any winter weather = immediate fail.
We are getting freezing rain here. The kids were home by 12, I was home by 2:30. Even Boeing was shutting down at 2. We, as a city, know we suck at dealing with icy roads and pretty much shut everything down at the first hint. The smart people go home and stay there. I've never owned a set of winter tires, I don't own a ice scraper and I've never shoveled snow. We aren't prepared to deal with winter conditions. I'm not even sure the county or city even owns a sand truck. Snow is something that falls from the sky so the kids can play in it, then it's gone by 2:00 pm. We just wait till it passes.
By Saturday it will be back in the 60s. 
northerner friends on facebook are pissing me off. mazdeuce said it exactly right. We dont have snow tires, and at 8am when we went to work this am, it wasnt supposed to be this bad. At 1pm when it did get nasty, everyone freaked out.
This mess scares me right now. 50k people at least are on gridlocked highways right now. Gas tanks are going to run out, and its only going to get colder. We dont keep emergency kits in our cars for scenarios like this, because it never happens.
Yeah, it wasnt predicted and I drove the GTO this morning to work. Luckily I got out of court about 10am and realized that it was going to get bad quick. I barely made it up the hill to my house by alternating the traction control switch. I had to go pick up my wife since her summer tires on the Speed 6 dont work in this temp but the '96 4Runner will go anywhere.
Probably the biggest problem locally was that they let schools out and the buses all got stuck on the side roads.
Isn't this footage of some southern road after only an inch of snow?
I keed, I keed! 
ScreaminE wrote: Yeah I get tired of the pretentious shiny happy people who give the ole "back up north, new england, mi, oh, etc," this was nothin'. One thing I've learned up here in PA is that people are prepared. Both civilians and the municipalities. I drive a 4wd truck and my street is plowed before I can leave for work on most days. It's not that big of a deal. Back in NC, people have summer tires, and the local municipalities may have salt/snow plows, but not to the capacity required to handle snow. Whether it be 2" or 2'. Another thing is the ice. Southern cities tend to get a lot more ice storms that are impossible to drive on, unless you have studded tires.
This ^^^^^ here in WNC we have plows and salt trucks because we actually get snow a few times a year. I highly doubt any DOT depots in GA/SC have plows other than a few in Upstate SC or in North GA. Ice gets bad here at times since it will be 50F on Sunday and then 20F on Monday or Tuesday.
Southern warm ice is way worse than northern cold ice, anyway. The very worst driving conditions anywhere occur right at the freezing point- get coldcoldcold and traction is fine.
Second point- Why don't people just stay wherever the hell they are when it gets ugly? A few years ago, we had an absolutely horrible blizzard in Saskatoon- like the worst visibility I've ever seen (or not seen...) Roads blocked, couldn't see E36 M3, and the schools closed at noon, the height of the storm, and called the parents to come get their kids. Luckily, school is close to my house, wife walked over and collected them, and I just stayed at the shop, surfed the net, and just chilled. Streets were covered by stuck and crashed cars, nobody could move. By 8 pm, the storm was over, roads were clear enough my 4wd truck took me home just fine. Nobody ever died from not having supper on time...
You got what we had in Austin this morning. 4 Cop cars got slid into and I believe the final number was 268 separate accidents including 22 in a half hour. Total mess. Somewhere I just heard all of the body shops saying excellent in their best burns voice.
TG I can work remote most days so off to the home office I went and I just stayed away from the sliding nut jobs.
I lived in Atlanta from 1992 through 1994, and we had snow one day. I remember waking up that morning and realizing that the light coming through the windows was brighter than usual--from growing up in New York, I knew that meant we had snow.
A minute later a transformer blew.
Another minute later, my boss called: Dude, snow on the ground, no school today.
Then another minute later my downstairs neighbor called: David, the cable's out. Yes, I realize the power is out, but so is cable. So, wanna drink?
Our road was a giant sheet of ice, never mind the driveway. We walked up to the local bar. And that was pretty much our day.
MN drivers aren't as good as they used to be in the winter, either- i blame all the nanny devices that people think will get them out of any situation..
i got caught in a pretty intense ground blizzard on friday night just south of St Cloud, MN.. there was one half mile stretch of road where i stopped counting the cars in the ditch that i was driving past at 20... it was one of those deals where visibility would be perfect, then you'd drive out from behind some trees and you could barely make out the lines on the road- one spot even had a 5 or so foot tall drift that was growing over the southbound lane that had a couple of cars wedged in it... i went slow and steady and made it thru, hoping that I94 wasn't closed when i got to it for the rest of my drive home... thankfully, the interstate was perfectly clear for the 100 miles i was on it..
It's pretty bad in ATL right now, but I gotta say it's not impassable even for a car that's totally unprepared for it. I wouldn't have gone out in the traffic this afternoon (and I fortunately got home early and didn't have to). Now that everything has settled down though, I took the RX-8 out to gas it up before all the stations run out of fuel (had to go to a couple before I found one that had anything left) and it wasn't that bad. The roads are all ice, but even in a light-ish RWD sports car with summer tires it was fine if you knew what you were doing. That's not to place blame on anyone down here, I grew up driving in the snow/ice and that's just not an experience anyone has here, but it could be much worse.
Out my front window tonight (you can see the road is one big sheet of ice):
Out the back window earlier in the afternoon (only an hour or so after the snow started):
We flew into Atlanta from Boston at Christmas a few years ago, had a minivan reserved from National and drove thru accumulating snow to Alpharetta and later to Buford on the nearly new all seasons without incident.
It was amazing to watch the scene outside our van however. Between people with no (and I mean ZERO) awareness of the fact that one must drive differently and many, many driving on old hard bald tires (same as the zero awareness in a lot of cases) I frequently found it necessary to do things I would not normally need to do to avoid having people come crashing into me. I stopped at several intersections despite having the right-of-way because it was obvious the persons approaching from a tangent to me who were supposed to be stopping had no chance because they waited too long to slow. I also pulled off to the side while sitting at a stop light because I could see someone coming up behind me was not slowing anywhere near soon enough - sure enough they went by me and thru the red light straight as an arrow, sliding along on what were probably tread free tires.
And yes, black ice is a bitch and at times catches nearly everyone, everywhere, no matter how well equipped, by surprise - at times - but the level of stupid driving I saw that day is unmatched in my 50 years of driving.
as long as they didn't salt the roads, keeping ATL's craigslist full of beautiful rust free cars i'm happy. I'll be sure to check out atl copart lots the next few months as well after all of these wrecks, Austin tx's too
It's funny... I lived in Atlanta up until 1980. I remember getting snow at least once a year growing up in most of the areas we lived in (Chamblee, Cummings, Sandy Springs). When we moved to PA the snow didn't phase me... there was just more of it and more often.
Oh and people are going ape-sh1t about the snow up here as well, since it's been a few years since we've gotten so many significant snow falls nobody seems to remember this is NORMAL. I woke up to a little over an inch on the car this morning that wasn't really predicted this far west. Since it wasn't predicted, most of the secondary roads weren't treated at all. It was an annoying drive in to work.
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