Georgia’s top transportation official performed a difficult tightrope walk Thursday — joining Gov. Nathan Deal in praising his employees while trying to avoid appearing self-satisfied about his department’s response to a pair of winter storms that knocked the state sideways.
Georgia Department of Transportation Commissioner Keith Golden detailed a toilsome month for workers at the monthly State Transportation Board meeting. Regarding the last storm and early preparedness efforts, he said “we were very fortunate we got that right.”
“We were fortunate people were at home, and that the event happened overnight,” he said.
Far from forgotten was the Jan. 28 storm and mammoth traffic jam that had metro Atlanta commuters spewing invectives. Golden was careful to say GDOT had learned lessons it would incorporate into future storm response planning.
An ongoing consideration is how to manage public expectations about what GDOT is capable of doing with its current resources. Golden noted that buying more snow and ice removal equipment could be costly.
Few in-state contractors own that kind of equipment. And if the state were to call upon those contractors to start stocking snow plows, it would have to pay them whether the equipment was needed or not, Golden said.
Another problem encountered during the storm was the capacity of the 511 phone system, which provides real-time information about traffic conditions.
On a normal day, about 3,000 calls are received. But calls to the system spiked during the January storm to 93,000. During the February storm, 511 received 22,000 calls.
People who called during peak times were getting busy signals.
Golden said GDOT could expand its call system capacity, but that could cost up to $6,000 more per month.
In January, a simultaneous release of students and office workers created wall-to-wall traffic on the interstates that blocked snow plows from treating roads. Many motorists remained stranded in their vehicles overnight or abandoned them. But during February’s storm, the roads were nearly empty as residents heeded warnings from government officials to stay home.
Deal called that the “human factor,” and said that element of winter storm planning is still hard to prognosticate.
When it comes to weather forecasting and interagency cooperation, Deal said the latest storm illustrates “I think we have learned to do that very, very well.”
“I think we have in fact set a model for the rest of the country,” Deal said.
The costs of the two snow storms are still being tallied. But at the first Severe Weather Task Force meeting on Wednesday, Gov. Nathan Deal indicated that he is willing to spend money to prepare for the next winter crisis. He said he believes state lawmakers are like-minded.
The question remaining for the group to decide is, how much spending is practical for a Southern state with infrequent snowfall?
Deal said the state experienced warm winters the last few years, and that residents became accustomed to it. Now, Georgians must gird themselves for what meteorologists say could be a cycle of very cold winters, he said.
While much of the past few weeks has been focused on number-crunching and post-storm analysis, much of Thursday’s meeting was focused on GDOT’s hard-working foot soldiers.
Golden opened his presentation by playing a video clip from a Saturday Night Live skit that poked fun at the state’s improbable immobilization by snow. A fictional Atlanta gentleman, “Buford Calloway,” admitted that he had panicked when two inches of snow fell Jan. 28.
He climbed into his white Cadillac Escalade and “went to the safest place I could think of: The interstate.” After becoming trapped there in his vehicle, a kerchief-clutching Callowaywas eventually rescued — by the sun.
The crowd tittered at the joke. But with all due deference to Mother Nature, Golden said that HERO truck drivers and road maintenance workers — several dozen of whom attended the meeting, and others who watched the meeting broadcast at their district offices — were the unsung heroes of the storm crises.
They worked 12-hour shifts for days, criss-crossing thousands of interstate and state route lane miles to clear ice and assist drivers with disabled vehicles. The State Transportation Board passed a special resolution Thursday recognizing those efforts.
The challenge of critiquing the storm response has been “not beating up on employees for something they didn’t have any control over,” said board member Dana Lemon, who represents parts of Clayton, Cobb, Douglas, Fayette, Fulton and Henry counties.
“All they were was implementers,” Lemon said. “Once they were told what to do, they did the best job they could.”
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