Motorists and commercial truck drivers alike have largely heeded the warning to stay off the roads, so fewer calls for help were coming into GDOT’s 511 center on Wednesday morning than during the Jan. 28 winter storm.
All the interstates in metro Atlanta had two lanes that were passable, said GDOT’s chief engineer Russell McMurry. Road maintenance crews are taking advantage of a slight break in the weather to retreat with sand and salt, he said.
At the Transportation Management Center, engineers and maintenance supervisors were using GDOT cameras to zoom in on the asphalt and see whether there was a splash from tires as they passed. That splash indicates that the ice hasn’t bonded to the roads and that they can be plowed. In one instance, McMurry saw a splash after zooming in on a portion of I-20 east. He telephoned a crew, which arrived in under five minutes to plow that section of road.
However, officials cautioned that roads continue to be extremely dangerous.
One milk truck that went into a ditch earlier Wednesday morning on I-285 East at Flat Shoals Road was causing a traffic backup around 11 a.m., because the interstate had to be closed so that several wrecker trucks could haul it out.
In Augusta, the situation is extremely perilous and of 12 trucks that had been borrowed from that area, four were sent back.
“Augusta,” GDOT deputy director Todd Long said, “is getting hammered.”
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