The snowflakes that fell over metro Atlanta’s interstates Tuesday landed mostly on roadways that were unprotected against ice. Last week, state officials had indicated that highways had been pre-treated to prevent ice.
But the state Department of Transportation did not have the time or supplies to finish applying anti-icing salt solution to interstate overpasses, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned. And according to DOT Chief Engineer Russell McMurry, it did not pre-treat any other regular travel lanes before the storm began. That was never even its plan.
Pre-treating roadways is a new tool at the Georgia DOT, and there’s disagreement nationally about how well it works. It’s embraced by many states, now including Georgia, as a valuable tool, but some places reject it, including New York City. It has limited effect without followup plowing and gravel — followup that was prevented Tuesday by Atlanta’s instant traffic jam.
It remains unclear whether pre-treating the roads would have made a difference in last week’s highway nightmare. But slippery roads and the crashes they caused were part of the debacle. And as the state now undertakes an examination of its approach to the storm, pre-treating is a key focus.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said the city had pre-treated most major bridges and emergency routes. This meant, he said, there was little ice accumulation in front of hospitals, fire stations, police precincts and other emergency-responder locations.
On commuter routes, several Atlantans told the AJC that surface streets were slippery with ice.
Officials talked about pre-treating last week with pride at first, then after the AJC raised questions, acknowledged it as problematic.
“The amount of pre-treatment certainly is what we are evaluating,” McMurry said. “Could more be done? The answer is, absolutely. Yes. We certainly are very disappointed for these conditions and very apologetic for these conditions that it resulted in. But as everybody knows, the gridlock resulted from everybody leaving at one time and then we could not do what we needed to do.”
Gov. Nathan Deal told reporters Thursday that the state should have done a better job on pre-treatment. “I would have liked to have seen us have more preparation on the roadways in terms of treatment,” Deal said. “I would like for us to have done a better job in that regard.”
Pre-treated or not, all roads froze as an overwhelming throng of Atlanta drivers took to the roads at once Tuesday afternoon, packing the lanes to a standstill. Gravel trucks and snowplows couldn’t get through.
DOT had started pre-treating overpasses as soon as the morning rush hour ended, at 9 a.m. But the crews had at least two problems. One was the traffic, which stopped short the continuing effort to prepare the roads. With no salt trucks able to follow up, what brine had been put down likely became diluted over time and washed away or re-froze, experts said.
The other problem was partly of the state’s own making. Trying to place resources throughout the state for the storm, it had only 15 brine storage tanks in metro Atlanta, enough to do the overpasses but not the other lanes, McMurry said, and not enough trucks to bring more in.
“As it stands today we did not have enough of the brine in tanks” to treat all lanes for this storm, McMurry said Friday. “That’s something we will be looking at.”
DOT believes it pre-treated “all the main” overpasses, McMurry said, though he did not know what portion that comprised.
Some of that pre-treatment was by a questionable method: using the dry salt and gravel mix that is usually used instead after snow falls. It melts fallen snow and provides traction.
But on dry roads that mixture gets brushed to the shoulder very quickly in highway traffic, and it’s also not much use for traction if it ends up underneath the snow. Not to mention, as it’s dropped, it can bounce up and scratch cars.
Ben Jordan, a program director at the University of Wisconsin’s Transportation Information Center, which educates government agencies on winter weather response, said he “would not consider this a viable option” for pre-treatment.
McMurry said DOT also had those concerns. All the same, McMurry said, as time ran short on Tuesday for pre-treatment, DOT resorted to deploying some of the salt and gravel trucks as well. And the state is still considering this as a pre-treatment tool next time around.
In spite of these issues, state officials cited pre-treating when they first defended their performance on Wednesday. Charley English, director of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, lamented that if only traffic had not congealed, gravel trucks and plows could have moved in to finish the job, because the state had actually followed the plan drawn up in the wake of the 2011 icy-highway disaster.
“We did everything we said we were going to do,” English told the AJC in an interview; “got extra plows, did the pre-treating.” Thursday, as the state’s response came under nationwide fire and the AJC began asking questions about the pre-treating, that stance changed with the governor’s statement.
Experts in other states don’t call pre-treating a silver bullet. But many value it. The ingredients used can include anything from simple salt to magnesium chloride or calcium chloride, or even beet juice or cheese brine.
For this recent storm, South Carolina pre-treated interstates and priority routes with a liquid salt mixture.
“It worked out OK; we came through the storm OK,” said Jim Johannemann, assistant maintenance engineer for the state transportation department. (The storm hit South Carolina hours after it hit Georgia, so it didn’t have a big impact on the afternoon commute.)
Johannemann said the mix keeps ice from bonding to the road, making it easier for traffic to break up the ice and, if it gets bad, for plows to remove it.
Pre-treating can be tricky: Some types can be slippery above 25 degrees. When the temperature falls into the teens, some types simply won’t work at all.
“There is a right answer, but there are a lot of wrong answers,” Johannemann said.
In Atlanta, the temperature Tuesday started out at 30 degrees, then fell to 25 at noon and 20 at 8:30 p.m., according to the National Weather Service.
North Carolina received anywhere from two inches of snow in the central part of the state to a foot in the northeastern coastal area. That state pre-treated select travel lanes, overpasses and ramps on interstates and primary roads beginning Monday, depending on the weather forecasts for areas, said Steve Abbott, spokesman for the state department of transportation. Raleigh caught the storm about 5 p.m., and the commute wasn’t greatly affected, Abbott said.
But at least one major metro area with congested traffic doesn’t pre-treat at all: New York City.
“We’ve never been comfortable with the spray treatments available,” said Vito Turso of the city’s Sanitation Department. “They are not effective enough to invest in.”
To prepare for snow and ice, New York officials track three weather forecasting services and the National Weather Service. Once they know, they deploy 450 salt spreaders to locations around the city, ready to hit the streets at the first sight of snow.
If they get more than two inches of snow, they send out 1,700 garbage trucks with plows.
That type of response requires a huge investment in equipment. Georgia officials have long been frank that even if it would work, they are reluctant to spend that kind of money on equipment that might see little use.
One city where snow isn’t so rare, Denver, pre-treats roads just twice a year or so. And then, just bridges and overpasses, much as Georgia had hoped to do.
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