The worst snowstorm in nearly a decade blew into Atlanta early Tuesday afternoon, paralyzing the city in literally a matter of minutes and halting thousands of Atlantans in their tracks.
School children were stranded in their schools. … Hundreds were trapped in shopping malls, air traffic at Hartsfield International Airport was virtually shut down and a monumental citywide traffic jam left thousands sitting in their cars for hours.
Sound familiar? Oh, and, by the way, the governor declared a state of emergency. It was all followed by some modest handwringing over Atlanta’s preparedness for such a crisis.
By the weekend, everyone had pretty much moved on.
The first two sentences opened the front-page coverage of this newspaper on Jan. 13, 1982. Snow Jam was a huge story, much as it was a couple of weeks ago. But it was hardly novel. You would see pretty much the same kind of coverage in 1993, 2000, 2009 and 2011. Before that: 1940, 1960 and 1973.
In fact, I found such stories going back to 1899. That year, the temperature fell to minus 9 degrees and The Atlanta Journal sent its reporters out on relief wagons distributing food and coal to keep people from starving or freezing to death. By the weekend, though, the weather improved and everyone moved on.
For a long time we’ve dismissed snow and ice storms as rare annoyances that do little more than provide us all something to talk about. Because they seem so rare, it’s easy to think it futile to worry about them much. Instead we get used to enduring a few days of misery every few years. We note that it’s silly for a Southern city to buy expensive road equipment. The folks from snowy places laugh at the hapless Southern drivers; the Southern drivers remind their sneering neighbors that Delta offers them flights home every day.
Then everyone moves on – until the next time.
Something is fundamentally wrong about thinking this way. For one thing, these storms can be fatal – 10 deaths were attributed to the 1982 version of Snow Jam. And that happened when we were a metro area of a mere 2.5 million.
If you look at slow-motion images of traffic clogging the interstates last week, it looks like Atlanta is having a heart attack. Since 1982, metro Atlanta has doubled in girth and density, so the heart attacks are more immediate and catastrophic. And while we’ve gotten bigger, we haven’t adequately expanded the capacity of our circulatory system.
This time, our arteries blocked in just minutes. In fact, they tend to be blocked almost every day. Wouldn’t it be great to simply install a massive stent on I-285?
So, Snow Jam 2014 produced a lot of annoyances but few fatalities. Yet, it is hard to overstate the danger in which people were placed. On the night when 10,000 schoolchildren were stranded in their schools, what if the power had gone out – as it often does? What if the weather had turned colder and snowier? Instead of telling touching stories of brave teachers nursing their kids through the night, we almost certainly would have been reporting a more sobering story
Let me make another analogy: Plane crashes. Fatal commercial crashes also are pretty rare. Also unlike most snow storms, virtually 100 percent of plane crashes end really badly. This is probably why we demand rigorous maintenance standards, strict rules governing pilot behavior and an elaborate communication system that is ever on the watch.
Only sheer luck and favorable weather prevented us from the kind of horror and loss that comes from a plane crash. We would move from being a joke on Jon Stewart, to being portrayed as a city and state that fiddled as children died. Our national profile would shift from incompetent to negligent.
But, happily, we dodged the worst. We have a fresh chance to get it right. Part of getting it right is to look at Atlanta as it is – a bit bloated with severe cardiovascular disease. We can wish forever that we coordinated more or that we had more mass transit or that we need more alternate routes like they have in Chicago or Dallas. We must confront metro Atlanta as it is instead of what we wish it was.
Two great quotes come to mind: “Don’t waste a crisis,” attributed often to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
The other is from Albert Einstein, who offered this simple definition: “Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
