Days in advance, weather forecasters were spot-on in predicting the scope and severity of last week’s winter storm. There would be 3 to 5 inches of snow followed by freezing rain.

Georgia Department of Transportation officials, still smarting from a brief, icy storm that caught them off guard last month, said they would be “extra sensitive” this time, acknowledging that this latest storm would be a nasty one.

Then it hit and life in metro Atlanta virtually shut down for the week.

Seven long days later, rising temperatures have finally eased cleanup efforts. And metro Atlantans, many of them stuck home with their children when classes were canceled, are left wondering what local leaders could have done differently.

Ice Jam 2011 — or whatever name it takes — exposed shortcomings in regional planning, coordination, leadership and response, potentially making conditions worse than they had to be — and for longer. Schools across metro Atlanta remained shuttered all week for the first time in memory. Mail went largely undelivered until Wednesday and the hit to the regional economy was estimated as high as $300 million.

The snow began Sunday night. But Gov. Nathan Deal, who took office on Monday, did not speak about the crisis until Tuesday and gave little indication he had taken charge, saying the state’s response had “worked fairly well.” He backed off later in the week, saying he was not satisfied.

DOT Commissioner Vance Smith seemed tone-deaf to rising public frustration when he said Tuesday, “I think we are doing a great job.”

Fulton County Commission Chairman John Eaves, like anyone who ventured out last week, found himself sliding around, being rerouted and frustrated by the regional response.

“We have existing plans if there’s a chemical spill or a tornado, but clearly we haven’t thought out what happened in a snowstorm,” Eaves said. “We need to learn better to coordinate what we do. We are all interconnected. City streets feed onto county roads, which connect to state routes. We need to establish a priority system or a tier system [of priority roads in connecting jurisdictions that need to be cleared first].”

To be sure, the storm was extraordinary for Georgia, bringing several inches of snowfall followed by freezing rain and days in which even the highest temperatures were below freezing. The storm presented a major challenge for a region not accustomed to such weather.

Still, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s reporting found no evidence of a comprehensive regional plan or a fully coordinated response, leaving the metro area’s numerous jurisdictions to fend for themselves — with predictable results.

“We don’t really coordinate efforts necessarily with [the state DOT], because they’re out there doing their system,” said Gwinnett County Transportation Director Brian Allen. “There is no coordinated effort to clear roadways, regardless of whose jurisdiction they are.”

Allen said his agency had “some, but not a lot” of communication with state officials.

The priority for the state DOT was to attack the interstates first with plows and salt trucks and then venture onto arterial roads. The agency’s crews never caught up, and the unplowed snow and sleet froze hard and immobilized much of the region. All interstates through Atlanta, a major Eastern transportation hub and crossroads, were impassable at times during the week.

State transportation officials waited until Tuesday to hire private contractors for help in clearing the roads. DOT also did not stagger shifts for its road crews, allowing snow and ice to pile up or refreeze while there were no workers on the roads, state officials said.

Local authorities realized early on that DOT wouldn’t be much help clearing state routes in their areas.

“They got overwhelmed,” said Tom Black, who heads Sandy Springs’ public works department and ran DeKalb County’s for 12 years. “They couldn’t do much on the secondary roads.”

In fact, localities sometimes had to help the state. Sandy Springs workers sanded lanes on I-285 when traffic was unable to make it up an icy slope.

Late Friday, DOT released documents that detail how each of its seven districts would respond to winter storms. Some laid out which state routes were most important to treat, some didn’t. They did not detail coordination with other jurisdictions’ road priorities.

DOT officials did not grant an in-depth interview for this story. Instead, DOT officials responded with a letter to the editor in which Smith talked in general terms about having 1,800 workers on storm duty. The agency offered few specifics on its planning for this storm. While it said it had about 150 trucks in the area, the agency would not detail how many plows and salt trucks were deployed.

Earlier, a DOT spokeswoman said “at its height” DOT had 12 crews clearing I-285.

When DOT is out of the equation, cleanup is left to jurisdictions that are under-equipped. DeKalb has two plows and 10 salt spreaders. Cobb has six spreaders and no plows. Fulton has seven salters and no plows. Gwinnett has 18 spreaders and six plows. The city of Atlanta has 11 plows.

In comparison, Charlotte, which suffered citizen anger from slow response several years ago, expanded its fleet to 36 plows.

Former Georgia DOT Commissioner Harold Linnenkohl said snow removal equipment loses out in a cost-benefit analysis.

“You cannot buy enough equipment to cover something like this and have it just sitting on the yard. It may sit on the yard 365 days a year for, say, three years,” he said. “So how much money do you put into that type of an operation — or those types of pieces of equipment — instead of taking care of the road itself?”

Black said budget cuts in recent years have hamstrung DOT’s response efforts.

“They’ve had cut after cut after cut; they’ve taken a beating in personnel and equipment,” said Black. “That comes back to haunt you.”

In April, DOT officials noted the maintenance budget, which includes emergency work, had been cut 40 percent, or $230 million, from fiscal 2007 to 2009.

The agency’s maintenance engineer told the DOT board that there wasn’t enough money to pay for a host of expenses.

DOT board chair Bill Kuhlke told staff to approach legislators with those concerns. “I don’t think they have any idea what we’re faced with,” he said.

But former Cobb County Commission Chairman Bill Byrne disputed the argument that it’s not worth having more snow equipment in Georgia. He called the costs of adding such equipment “insignificant” compared to a “population losing a week’s wages.”

He said buying extra plows and sanders “is no big deal, it’s not a big money issue,” even if they are only used once a year.

One public works director said plow attachments run about $10,000 and can be hooked onto dump trucks that public works departments already own. Salting attachments can cost up to $20,000.

Cobb County at one time had six snow plow attachments, Byrne said, and now it has none.

Faye DiMassimo, Cobb’s DOT director, said county officials talked early on with city agencies in Cobb and learned the state DOT would be of little help clearing roads in the county. She said the county, with the help of private contractors, worked on primary roads as well as the areas around hospitals and fire and police stations.

“I think our response was well-done,” DiMassimo said.

But Byrne was disappointed by the state and county response. He said he found most roads passable, but only “if you follow the ruts in the road.”

“When you have a county the size of ours, you better have equipment and material on staff,” Byrne said.

Byrne lauded Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed for publicly taking charge of a belated snow removal effort.

“He said when a road is in our jurisdiction, we need to clear it,” Byrne said. “It’s your constituents using the road.”

On Tuesday, Reed stood before TV cameras and said thoroughfares such as Peachtree Street, which are in state DOT jurisdiction, are essentially his. He said the storm taught him a lesson: “Move quicker to take custody for just anything that’s in the city limits.”

Keith Mason, former chief of staff for then-Gov. Zell Miller in the 1990s, said Deal might have been “a little tentative,” but said that he had just been sworn in.

Mason said Miller was a take-charge former Marine who liked to jump into the thick of a crisis. “He would get out there and be driven around and go see people and be seen,” Mason said. “He understood that it was not just getting the job done, but it was also managing perceptions.”

Some counties jumped into a do-it-yourself strategy. After getting caught off guard by the Christmas snowstorm, Union County hired private contractors to help plow its roads as soon as the first flakes fell.

“We were able to get the snow off all the main roads and a lot of the secondary roads before the cold weather really hit,” said Lamar Paris, Union’s county commissioner.

Instead of getting complaints — like it did last month — Union got praise.

The region’s top elected officials met at the Atlanta Regional Commission last week but didn’t discuss the storm. The ARC is one of the few venues that brings local government leaders together regularly.

The planning agency focuses on water, transportation and other regional issues, but its aim is long-term, not immediate operational issues, said Director Chick Krautler.

Still, when the ARC board meets next it will probably discuss storm planning.

“There is the question, Who is responsible? And there is a gap there,” he said. “Quite honestly that is a gap that we need to deal with.”

“I heard some county people saying, ‘We were waiting for the state, we were waiting for the state.’ It gets to a point where people have to say, ‘We are going to step up.’”