Pitching in and helping others

And she did ok with that plan, creeping along, until she got to the foot of a hill near the 1400 block of Moreland. Rear-wheel drive, even in a luxury car, is no match for an icy road.

“I put my foot on the accelerator and we started slipping and sliding, other cars were coming around me, cars in both directions were skidding, and finally I just stopped in the middle of the road,” Brenda Webb said.

She called AAA and 911 on her cellphone and said a prayer, but it seemed as though no one would show up to help. Finally, an Atlanta Police Officer arrived and helped her son push the car to the side of the road before he left on the next call. By then it was nearly 4 p.m., and for the next hour and a half they sat in their car, bracing themselves, deciding there was no sense in getting angry even when two other cars slid into them as those cars attempted the hill.

They’d bundled up for the run to the store, but it was getting cold. They looked at the warm lights glowing in the homes along the avenue. Then a man stepped out on his porch. He asked if they needed to come in and use the bathroom or anything. Melvin took them up on the offer and went back toward the car, when the man’s wife called out to them and asked them if they wanted some tea or hot cocoa to keep warm.

“I said, ‘Tea’ and she asked me ‘What kind?’” Brenda Webb said.

Soon the husband brought out two steaming cups of cinnamon tea.

It would be another six hours before the Webbs would make it home, even after another group of strangers, including one man on a bicycle, got their car moving again. They eventually abandoned their car in a Pizza Hut parking lot and walked the next three miles toward home in the dark.

And as Webb made a hot meal for herself, her son and her husband—who had gone out searching for them—she tried to remember the couple’s name who helped them on Moreland. She couldn’t remember if the wife’s name was Kathleen or Catherine, but Webb said she’ll never forget the moment of warmth the couple offered in a time of need.

- Rosalind Bentley

Mr. Plow

After the 2011 ice storm paralyzed metro Atlanta, Roger Panitch decided he wasn’t going to stuck like that again.

So he bought a snow plow. In Atlanta. Who’s laughing now?

“It was mostly for business reasons,” said Panitch, who owns College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving company.

But Panitch’s snow plow is being put to much more important use this week. After rescuing a stranded employee and a Fulton County bus driver overnight, Panitch was off Wednesday morning to pick up 20 children who took refuge at homes near The Epstein School in Sandy Springs, where they are students.

“Two couples took in 20 kids overnight,” Panitch said, including his two sons and daughter.

Now Panitch is bringing them home.

“It may take several trips,” he said, noting he can fit no more than four children in his truck at a time. “But I think we’ll get it done by the end of the day.”

-Christian Booone

What’s Spanish for ‘Welcome to Atlanta?’

At Habif, Arogeti & Wynne, the largest Georgia-based tax, accounting and business consulting firm, CEO Richard Kopelman made it home to Chastain Park in a couple of hours Tuesday night. But he and his partners kept running the numbers well into Wednesday to ensure that everyone else was OK too.

“We had about 20 people who ended up sleeping in the office and there were a lot of emails going around to the entire firm, saying, ‘Who’s here? Come up to this floor,’” Kopelman said on Wednesday about the 300 employee firm that normally spreads across four floors in the Queen Building at the Concourse in Atlanta. “This morning, Bob Greenberger, one of our partners, went over there on his own and went floor by floor to identify who’s there.”

On the “home safely” side of the ledger: Two employees whom Kopelman drove back to pick up Wednesday morning and drive out to their East Cobb residences. And a third whom Chris Edgeworthy, a director at the firm, had already come back and picked up around midnight on Tuesday.

“I think everyone in the area has been trying to help out,” Kopelman said modestly. Or maybe he was just being incredibly accurate.

Kopelman’s two children were trapped in the swirl of snow traffic on Tuesday. After seven hours in the car with their au pair - who’d just arrived a week ago from Spain, where she’d never even seen snow - they were finally rescued by a friend of Kopelman’s with a four-wheel drive vehicle.

What’s Spanish for “Welcome to Atlanta?”

“We gave her the day off,” Kopelman chuckled on Wednesday. “She played in the snow.”

- Jill Vejnoska

New resident helped others

Though he’s lived in Atlanta only two months, Oz Kocdemir said his adopted city already feels like home.

So when he woke up early this morning and saw news reports about all the people trapped in their cars on the Downtown Connector near his home, Kocdemir, who works with the Swedish American Chamber of Commerce, loaded up Thermoses of coffee, tea and Swedish glog (a mixture that includes red wine and various spices and raisins) and headed to the interstate.

“I thought I’d help, no big deal,” said Kocdemir after delivering a hot cup of coffee to Emmett Johnson, a 60-year-old who spent the night on an embankment off the northbound ramp onto the Downtown Connector from Freedom Parkway.

Johnson, shielded by a makeshift lean-to covered with blue tarp and dressed in layers, said his military background helped him make it through the freezing night, when the wind chill dipped below zero degrees. “I wouldn’t have come out here if I wasn’t prepared,” he said just before sunrise Wednesday.

- Christian Boone