The 911 operators in Cobb County had a queue of more than 100 vehicle crashes to deal with this afternoon during the snow’s worst.
Cobb police spokesman Sgt. Dana Pierce said it was a “mini rush hour” on the roads from 1 to 2 p.m.
“Everyone seemed to have left the office at the same time to beat traffic, creating traffic,” he said.
About 10:30 a.m., he said, folks were not slowing down for the snow and a couple vehicles ended up in ditches near Villa Rica Road. No one was seriously injured.
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“People were just not yielding and their speeds ... were as if they were on dry pavement,” he said.
The wintry weather, which is affecting all of metro Atlanta, is expected to drop between 2 and 4 inches of snow onto Cobb throughout the day, Channel 2 Action News meteorologist Brad Nitz previously said.
Lindsey Wiles, spokeswoman for the city of Marietta, said Friday afernoon that Burnt Hickory Road had been closed for an hour earlier in the day due to all the accidents.
Wiles said that, in the span of three hours, crews had spread 20 tons of mixed sand and salt onto roads.
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On Friday, she said, they were putting it to good use.
‘Our first priority was to treat the areas need for school buses to get the children safely to where they needed to be,” Wiles said about 3:30 p.m. “Now that most of that is finished we are treating other areas around the city.”
The Cobb and Marietta school districts announced Friday that they are releasing students early because of the weather. Kennesaw State University also shut down early.
Cobb County government offices also announced they will close at noon.
In Cobb, temperatures will fall below freezing and will be in the upper mid-20s by the morning, Nitz said.
That means one thing.
“Areas of black ice will form overnight and into Saturday morning,” according to Nitz.
Pierce said that all should Friday if people can behave during the regular rush hour time, but he’s also worried about black ice on the roads.
“They may not appear to be iced over … people need to slow down and leave a bit earlier,” he said.
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