Deep Freeze 2011: State can’t afford sitting out storms

Many cherished Southern traditions are worth keeping — biscuits made with White Lily flour or black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day come to mind.

One attitude that should be relegated to the ages, though, is the common belief that when a bitter blast of winter weather slams into us, our best response is to stay home and wait for the thaw.

Put simply, Deep Freeze 2011 etched a portrait in tire-scarred ice of a failure in leadership. It should not have happened that the nation’s eighth-largest metropolitan area was shut down for most of a workweek in the wake of a severe storm.

That might have been acceptable for yesterday’s Georgia. It cannot be the norm in today’s Atlanta, a logistics center and transportation hub. Our state’s ports and roads handle a significant amount of import and export goods. Georgia’s sought to define itself as a state at the service of businesses, and the jobs and taxes they bring.

We did not serve those interests well last week when frozen roads got the best of us.

Yes, there will be times when, despite near-superhuman efforts, Mother Nature exercises its ultimate supremacy and whips us soundly, rendering roads unusable and sending office workers back home to hone telecommuting skills. That didn’t happen this time. The weather got the upper hand quickly and held stubbornly to its lead.

Metro Atlantans will long tell stories about this great storm. We’ll talk of how some of the widest highways in the nation became ice rinks, of how heavy trucks could do no more than spin their wheels along I-285. Mall parking lots emptied out and people just stayed inside, day after day.

There’s no doubt that workers of the Georgia Department of Transportation and the region’s counties and cities offered up a valiant effort under dangerous, uncommonly miserable conditions. Their deployment of available resources against a hazardous layer cake of ice and snow was commendable.

That their endeavor fell short and fell behind is not a failure of employees, but rather one of resources and leadership. That won’t change if the common assumption remains that the weather is likely to always win. Ice storms are not rare in Atlanta; we should lead the nation in battling them.

Some local cities went into action mode early, and it showed when motorists encountered more pavement, and less slippery ice, beneath their tires.

Overall, our execution of this primary government function was too small, too fragmented and too slow.

State officials said local governments often didn’t ask for help. Inadequate coordination is to be expected when the prevailing thought is to do the best we can with what we have, then wait a spell for things to warm up. We must do better.

Transportation and emergency management officials in the Atlanta region, and Georgia, need to quickly rethink and revise planning and coordination efforts, starting at the state level.

Few expect Georgia or its local governments to spend millions on a lot of new snow- and ice-fighting machines that may rust in place during our normally mild winters. That would raise eyebrows even in boom times and is a nonstarter when legislators are all but searching Gold Dome couch cushions for coins to toss toward the state’s billion-dollar budget gap.

We may need more, but we likely don’t need the number of snow plows that a New York City or Chicago would use multiple times during an average winter. What we do need is better planning, coordination and action.

In revising storm-fighting playbooks, officials should figure out how to better share resources and better utilize the private sector. We’d expect GDOT equipment that taxpayers have already paid for to be first on the road when sleet or snow falls.

Before the next storm, state and local governments should have in place robust agreements with operators of suitable construction or road-building equipment, or even farm implements — anything capable of pushing a plow blade or spreading road salt. Some GDOT contractors began helping last Tuesday in the storm’s aftermath and the agency says that worked well.

Looking ahead, GDOT and cities shouldn’t wait until they’re overwhelmed before quickly using contractors to help clear streets.

Signing on in advance to borrow more heavy machinery when needed would be a smart public-private partnership of the kind touted by many elected leaders in this business-friendly state. Inking such deals requires government officials to be more proactive in recognizing the limits of current toolkits.

Our leaders should begin this work as soon as they can again travel icy roads back to their offices. We can’t afford a repeat of Deep Freeze 2011.

Andre Jackson, for the Editorial Board

Atlanta Forward: We look at major issues Atlanta must address in order to move forward as the economy recovers.