Atlanta weather | USPS, FedEx, UPS to deliver mail, packages Wednesday

By Kristi E. Swartz

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

That magazine or phone bill or greeting card may be in your mailbox today.

"We're expecting a vast improvement over operations in all areas," U.S. Postal Service spokesman Michael Miles told the AJC.

"That doesn't mean that it's normal, but we're starting to see things move in that direction.

The ice and snow presented two major challenges for the postal service. Trucks had trouble getting to central mail processing plants to pick up letters and packages -- and then individual mail carriers had difficulty getting to local post offices and into neighborhoods to deliver mail, Miles said.

Miles said Wednesday that has changed. More employees are able to get to work, and the postal service expects to get to more customers compared with Tuesday.

"You can expect more mail delivery today," he told the AJC.

When asked whether the postal service would operate on Sunday and Monday -- a federal holiday -- to deliver the backlog of mail, Miles said he did not know but said that has happened in the past because of extreme conditions, such as severe weather.

FedEx and UPS package deliveries were also resuming on Wednesday.

A FedEx spokeswoman told the AJC that the carrier is "slowly resuming operations," particularly toward the southern end of metro Atlanta.

Customers should still expect some delays in receiving their package, however.

"Employees are doing the best they can to get packages delivered," FedEx spokeswoman Sally Davenport told the AJC.

FedEx spokesman Jim McCluskey said that while weather complications continue, the company has been making deliveries in areas where it does have access and expects normal operations to resume Wednesday afternoon.

He said FedEx has a number of contingency plans for weather events, and the network is flexible. As such, the delay is more of an inconvenience to customers than it is a problem for the company.

With critical packages, such as medical supplies, McCluskey said FedEx does everything in its power to ensure the shipments are received.

"At the end of the day, the bottom line is we're still able to get the package delivered," he said.

A spokeswoman told the AJC that Sandy Springs-based UPS is dispatching trucks throughout metro Atlanta and the Southeast as some of the roads are starting to become passable.

Pickup and delivery service in most of the Southeast ground to a halt on Monday as the area got hit with ice and snow. UPS first will focus on delivering the packages that were supposed to go out on Monday – which means the ones that were scheduled to arrive Tuesday and Wednesday may be delayed, spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg said.

Because packages were unable to come into Atlanta to be sorted for the duration of the snow and ice storm, trucks on Wednesday are going out with just Monday's packages. Rosenberg said the sorting facilities are expected to reopen Wednesday afternoon.

"It going to take a day to clean up the system, certainly," she said.

“The focus is on getting what was the Monday volume out,” Rosenberg told the AJC.

There may be exceptions, she said. Some roads remain covered in ice.

“We’ll deal with that on a spot basis,” she said. “We don’t want our drivers to do something that they do not feel is safe.”

People expecting a package should check UPS’s website. A delivery that is delayed by weather will be marked as such, Rosenberg said.

When possible, UPS was routing packages around backed-up areas. Rosenberg said snowstorms in the Northeast have now delayed deliveries in other parts of the country, including parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, New York and Massachusetts.

Reporter Arielle Kass contributed to this article