Local governments in Georgia say they have learned from 'snowpocalypse'

ATLANTA — More than two inches of snow fell in metro Atlanta on a Friday in January, 11 years ago. It began late in the morning, when hundreds of thousands of students were in schools and many of the region’s 2.6 million workers were in their places of employment.

And on that day — Jan. 28, 2014 — almost everyone tried to go home around noon.

What followed was a day that will live in Atlanta infamy. Within 20 minutes, the major roadways ground to a halt, and remained that way for up to 24 hours. Thousands of students spent the night at their schools. Drivers spent the night in freezing cars. A woman gave birth on Interstate 285. The region became a national laughingstock.

Now, the National Weather Service is predicting two to four inches of snow or sleet beginning Friday morning, and local and state agencies are trying to avoid a repeat “snowpocalypse.”

J.D. Lorens, deputy director of the Cobb County Department of Transportation, was a Cobb police officer in 2014 who spent the day checking on abandoned cars and making sure people were safe.

“I think all of us remember snowmageddon,” he said.

The National Weather Service predicted about an inch of snow in metro Atlanta the day before the storm. But at about 3:30 a.m., well before superintendents decide whether to close schools, warnings became more dire.

The Georgia Emergency Management Agency gave no instructions to drivers. Then Gov. Nathan Deal went on the defensive after the fact, saying if the state government had urged people to stay home and the snowstorm was a dud, the public would have howled over the economic impact.

Government officials blamed meteorologists, who countered that even their earlier predictions would have turned roads into ice rinks.

This time, GEMA is taking the biggest lesson to heart and encouraging the public to stay home Friday and Saturday. Some local government officials said they plan to do the same. Cobb County announced Wednesday that its government facilities, including all courts except magistrate court, would close Friday and urged residents to avoid travel during the storm.

“I think the snowpocalypse taught everybody a lesson on how dangerous these things can be, so the public generally pays more attention to the information we put out about approaching weather systems and they act accordingly,” county spokesperson Ross Cavitt said. “People hopefully won’t get on the road in the first place.”

Peggy Allen, deputy director of roads and drainage for DeKalb County, was working in the same capacity in 2014.

“We did not really understand the magnitude of what was coming in,” she said. “Everyone started pretreating, but the storm got worse and after the snow stopped falling, the ice came. We had trees that were falling down. The roads were frozen.

“We were having to put more and more material on the road.”

DeKalb and other local transportation departments were running out of salt and sand. DeKalb also uses calcium chloride. Since 2014, the county’s stockpile of those materials has tripled, Allen said.

After the 2014 storm, DeKalb started planning, training and ordering materials for winter storms in the summer, Allen said. The county now updates its snow and ice removal plan every year and conducts after-action reviews following each storm, she said.

Gwinnett County has also beefed up its operations. In 2014, it had 500 gallons of brine, spokesperson Deborah Tuff said. Today, the stockpile is at 18,000 gallons. Then, the county had two brine tanks in pickup trucks, but now it has nine tanks in dump trucks. The county also has the capacity to mix brine faster now, Tuff said.

The county also now has 15 more employees available to work on call, four more spreaders and quadruple the number of plows, from six to 24. Government officials now work with the police department’s emergency operations center to respond to storms, Tuff said.

In Atlanta, then-Mayor Kasim Reed weathered criticism for underestimating the 2014 storm. He said he and state officials should have tried to send students, private workers and government employees home in that order, instead of all at once. But he, and other local leaders, said they only control their workers and their roads — not the interstates, and not the schools.

The city did not create its own transportation department until 2019. The Atlanta Department of Transportation now coordinates with the state during severe weather.

Cobb County will begin Thursday afternoon to pretreat its 430 miles of road with a salt and brine mixture, Lorens said. In 2014, that did not happen because officials thought rain would wash it away.

After the snow had already started to fall, “They went straight into a defensive posture,” Lorens said. By then, some local officials said, traffic was too snarled to treat the roads anyway.

Since 2014, the county has spent some of its sales tax revenue for capital projects on a new tank that allows unlimited brine to be mixed, Lorens said. Cobb bought three more brine trucks and four more salt spreaders, he said. And the county has new technology that geolocates vehicles and helps them ration materials better.

“We’ve learned a lot and we’ve updated a lot of our plans,” he said.

Friday’s forecasted snow would not be the most recent storm of its magnitude.

In December 2017, seven inches of snow fell in parts of Atlanta, but that happened on a Friday night. On Jan. 17, 2018, a Wednesday, about two and a half inches of snow fell, but the Atlanta government and local schools announced closures the day before and officials repeatedly warned people to stay home.

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Digital audience specialist Pete Corson contributed to this article.