Some of the crazy traffic we have seen in 2020 has been a fluke.
Tanker trucks do not explode in any kind of pattern. Fires under previously burned and collapsed bridges aren't planned. But bad or extreme weather almost always damns the Atlanta commute. As random, strange, and calamitous as the weather has been in 2020, a consistent atmospheric combination has caused the inconsistency. Follow along with an expert.
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"It's an active jet stream between two, kind of, anchored weather systems," 95.5 WSB meteorologist Kirk Mellish explained on the WSB Traffic Podcast this week. "One is a hot, dry ridge centered over Cuba and Florida and [the other] is a colder, snowy trough in the western and northern parts of the country. We're in the squeeze play in between, with the jet stream storm track just stuck overhead for weeks at a time, bringing one system after another. So we just get these brief, little breaks of a day or two where, if we're lucky, it's just dry and a little sun."
So until those ridges and systems change, which Mellish said could be another couple of weeks, Atlanta is likely to keep vacillating through the weather gears and not at all in cruise control. This means commuting will remain tricky.
And driving got downright treacherous last Saturday, when snowfall fell in droves in the mountains and part of the northern suburbs for a brief stretch of the morning. Wrecks, stuck cars, slick bridges, and snowy roads became fairly widespread in those areas, despite pavement temperatures largely above freezing.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
“You would have to have days on end, or at least 24 hours of temperatures below 32, so that when the precipitation starts falling, the roads are already a little bit below 32,” Mellish answered about how some (including yours truly) were surprised how the day unfolded. “However, if temperatures are 34 or even 36 degrees, you can still get accumulation on the roads if they have not been pretreated and if the rate of snowfall is particularly heavy.”
Mellish said if the fall rate is high enough, that snow can accumulate on roads with temperatures as high as even 40 degrees. He said that aggregate snowflakes — multiple flakes clumped together — can overcome the warmer pavement, pile on top of each other, and stick. However, if the pavement is that warm, Mellish said, “The moment that snow stops falling, it disappears.”
And that is what happened to parts of Cherokee, Forsyth, Hall, north Fulton, and north Gwinnett counties, at least in Metro Atlanta. Pavement temps were high, but the snow fell quickly and started creating problems. And then it disappeared.
95.5 WSB program director Pete Spriggs, who just last week announced his retirement, , showcased how he always has to stay plugged in to current events and the radio station. Even though Mellish's forecast called for snow, the flakes seemed more of a spectacle than a hazard. But when Spriggs and his wife, Kim, drove out to breakfast in Woodstock that morning, they saw cars sticking on hills and snow sticking to the roads. Spriggs called Mellish and me into action to bolster WSB's weather and traffic coverage.
In between on-air reports, I called the 911 dispatch centers in the aforementioned list of northern Metro Atlanta counties, and they were overwhelmed. Alpharetta and Lawrenceville had officials closing bridges along GA-400 and Highway 316 to treat them. Cherokee and Hall county crews had to untangle dozens of wrecks. Highway 369 in Forsyth and Hall — a key overpass across Lake Lanier — had become a solid sheet of ice, they told me.
Their big picture descriptions, along with the calls Floyd Hillman and Vanessa Croft received in the WSB 24-Hour Traffic Center, allowed both them and me to tell our listeners what to expect on the roads. The winter event pressed our music stations into wanting traffic reports, which Hillman and Croft provided on the spot.
The snow stopped, melted quickly, and gave way to a nosedive in temperatures and a heavy fog on Saturday night into Sunday. Our Sunday morning traffic reporter Veronica Harrell, who also works morning drive and middays during the week, had quite the task of reporting on this. But she had to get to WSB first!
“It’s scary,” Harrell recalled. “GA-400 doesn’t have lights all the way down from Alpharetta to I-285. I could not see. I was going slow.”
She said the visibility was very low, a theme she helped Channel 2 Action News cover that morning and she relayed repeatedly on 95.5 WSB.
“And it hung around for a while. Some of the camera shots I would see, especially in the northwest corridor — you couldn’t see anything.” Fortunately, Harrell didn’t have to deal with too many wrecks or icy spots that morning.
“The fog was pea-soup thick in my neighborhood and got worse,” Mellish said of a Saturday night trip he made. “I decided to turn around and go another way. I headed towards Acworth and it thinned out.”
Smilin' Mark McKay and I each had to white-knuckle our way from a party in Norcross back to our homes in Buckhead and Chamblee, respectively. So, yes, even experienced weather and traffic reporters got tensed up in the post-snowpocatlyptic fog last Saturday and Sunday.
And sandwiching the snow and fog events were three morning drives walloped by heavy rain and storms in the last two weeks. The most recent, this past Thursday, saw a bad line of storms square up on Atlanta’s heart at about 6:30 a.m.
“It was the worst possible time (for the storms) — and then you worry about the safety aspect,” McKay said on the podcast. He said that the storms came so quickly, they almost attempted to fly the WSB Skycopter beforehand. Not to be. McKay ended up driving Peachtree between Chamblee and WSB’s Midtown studios during the height of the storms and saw kids waiting at bus stops. “Their umbrellas did them no good.” He told parents on the air to expect some soggy children when they arrived home. The rain came in buckets.
“It’s so difficult, because you’re trying to get to work and your child is standing (at the bus stop) with an umbrella that’s not working,” Harrell, a devoted mother, said. In the past she has had to wait with her daughter in the car at the bus stop, before trying to get to work on time. Parents and kids have tough circumstances during storms, something employers and school districts should consider on mornings with inclement weather. Last Thursday would have been a great day for two-hour-delayed openings.
Predictably, that Thursday commute saw a litany of wrecks, including yet another RED ALERT shutting down I-75/southbound at I-675 in Henry County, where a tractor trailer flipped. This happens nearly every time rain falls in that interchange.
Thankfully, those storms cleared quickly and this mercurial weather pattern may settle soon. But in the meantime, be sure to prepare properly for your commute with live reports from our traffic experts on 95.5 WSB, Ch. 2 Action News, and the Triple Team Traffic Alerts App.
Doug Turnbull, the PM drive Skycopter anchor for Triple Team Traffic on 95.5 WSB, is the Gridlock Guy. He also writes a traffic blog and hosts a podcast with Smilin' Mark McKay on wsbradio.com. Contact him at Doug.Turnbull@cmg.com .
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