Atlanta mostly dodged a bullet dealt in the city’s first-ever inland tropical storm warning. Tropical Storm Irma bore down on Georgia on Sept. 11 and brought wind gusts of 60 mph, heavy rain and, fortunately a wave a preparedness.
Fittingly, September is National Preparedness Month.
An eerie nervousness hovered over Atlanta the weekend prior to the storm hitting, as forecasts generally agreed Atlanta would get hit with at least some of what was left of Irma. The first winds began to howl (we wish in Jimi Hendrix’s voice) Sunday, when skies were clear as a bell. Rain started falling Monday morning, but there was no rush hour. Schools metro-wide canceled and most people sat out of work. MARTA canceled all service for the first time ever. And Atlantans largely waited out the height of the storm safely inside.
“I think Atlanta handled Irma just as well as they could,” Alex Williams, my colleague on the WSB Traffic Team, said. “When it came to planning ahead to keep people off the road, I think we took lessons learned from winter storms and helped apply it to preparing and dealing with Irma before and when it hit.”
His sentiments echo the rest of us in the WSB Traffic Center trench.
Atlanta traffic saw a major influx of Florida traffic, as Sunshine State residents fled the storm. Then as soon as Irma left Atlanta’s auspices, those same evacuees took to mainly I-75 again to head back home. On Tuesday afternoon, I-75/southbound had over a 2.5-hour delay just between I-285 and Macon. And many sought refuge north of Atlanta and even north of Georgia, so I-75 through Bartow and Cobb Counties, I-285, and the Downtown Connector also felt the extra push. The delays, Williams said, would have been much worse, had schools gone back on Tuesday.
“All in all, I don’t think we could have handled it better in preparing for the storm, handing the storm, as well as dealing with the influx of evacuees in the metro. At the same time we wanted people to stay off the roads.”
Williams brought up a good point. Both Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and Florida Gov. Rick Scott urged people to delay their return home, as the infrastructure in south Georgia and many parts of Florida just wasn’t ready. Understandably, people were anxious to return home and, save a bit of angst and impatience we saw on social media. Atlantans handled the extra traffic well.
After Georgia DOT Commissioner Russell McMurry finished surveying the state he said Georgia ended up better off than predicted.
“[There were] just isolated areas with trees down with power lines. We had all roadways [that the state maintains] open by Tuesday night, unless power lines were involved,” McMurry told me via email Thursday. “We inspected about 170 bridges in two days and ended up with only three closed in the entire state due to flooding. It was cool seeing HERO’s on I-75 in south Georgia.”
McMurry is also proud of GDOT’s new road assistance initiative for outlying areas: CHAMP. There are 20 HEROs and CHAMPs patrolling I-75 from Florida up to Metro Atlanta. He said there were more flat tires than fuel needs.
Fuel has been at a premium in south Georgia and especially Florida, but that situation is improving. People in Metro Atlanta should be able to fill-up with ease, but prices remain higher than before.
“Although we’re still reeling from the effects of Irma in Metro Atlanta, motorists should begin to see gas prices retreat within the coming weeks,” AAA’s Garrett Townsend said. If you’re looking for a great way to track gas prices, try AAA’s mobile app.
As the storm cleanup continues, digest these numbers: DeKalb County 911 had over 4,000 calls in a 12-hour period Monday. Gwinnett PD had over 1,400 from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. that day. Hall County 911 continually told WSB that they had too many trees down to count. DeKalb and Hall seemed to be the two hardest hit Metro Atlanta counties, though every metro county had damage of some kind.
As we look ahead, power outages would be far less, if Georgia Power and the EMCs would make a greater effort to build lines below ground. The cost would be huge, but the danger of repairing the lines, the live wires themselves and the loss of power makes the effort worth further exploring.
Overall, the dip in temperatures took a bite out of Irma’s intensity. Even still, Atlanta had widespread damage and, traffic-wise, weathered the storm of road closures, lights out and extra evacuation traffic fairly well. Irma did not have had our local reporters harnessing themselves to balconies or getting wind-tunneled in driving rain. But if we had treated it as just another storm, traffic would have been much worse and more people likely would have died.
We played it right.
About the Author
