And here we Atlantans figured it was New York/New Jersey that would get snowed on and gridlocked and embarrassed on a civic level this week. Turns out we sunny Southerners aren’t impervious to Super Bowl weather — before the Peach Bowl moved indoors and became the Chick-fil-A Bowl, we used to call it “Peach Bowl weather” — even when the Super Bowl is being staged 880 miles to the north.
What happened Tuesday and was happening into Wednesday was the most sobering experience of the almost 30 years I’ve spent in Atlanta. Using the Weather Channel’s measure, this part of Cobb County saw just under two inches of snow. We didn’t get sleet. We didn’t get freezing rain, though the freezing would come later. This was not the epic ice storm of 2011 that paralyzed Atlanta for a full working week. This was two inches of snow on a Tuesday morning/afternoon.
At 11:50 a.m. Tuesday, I drove home from a non-essential errand as the snow was starting. I knew Cobb County schools planned to dismiss two hours early. There were no traffic issues at 11:50, and I assumed my wife, who works five minutes from our house, and my younger daughter, whose school is 15 minutes away, would be home before things got dicey.
At 12:58, I clicked on the Atlanta traffic map. (Bobby Cox is one of those who watches radar weather as a habit; I’m one who checks traffic.) Having lived here three decades, nothing should surprise me. This shocked me. In the span of an hour, Atlanta had turned not so much white with snow as red with coagulated roads.
My wife headed to school to drive our daughter home. They would arrive at 5:30 p.m., having needed five hours to go five miles on South Cobb Drive and the East-West Connector — two major arteries — before ditching the car at a bank and walking the last mile.
As it turned out, our family was lucky. We would hear of nine-hour slogs for neighbors; of even longer slogs that hadn’t yet gotten the sloggers home Wedneaday morning; of stranded school buses; of students and teachers and principals sleeping overnight at their schools. One of the givens of American life — that after a day at work or school, you’ll get to go home — was a given no more.
The attempt here isn’t to assess blame. (For one thing, I see mitigating circumstances. Should schools have closed for a storm that hadn’t begun and never rose to the level of a blizzard? Can roads be salted when they’re already jammed? Can mayors and governors regulate human nature?) This is more an admission of a frailty that, before Tuesday afternoon, I didn’t know existed. I didn’t know we as a city were this vulnerable to two inches of snow.
Northerners cluck about Southerners not knowing how to drive in the snow, and that’s partially true. But SnowJam 2014 was as much a function of congestion as it was meteorological conditions or automotive dexterity. We have too many cars and not enough roads, and when something happens to put most of us on those roads at the exact same moment and then those roads ice over … well, we can’t handle it. It pains me to admit it, but we just can’t.
We were flummoxed by the ice storm on the Friday before our Super Bowl in January 2000. (That put a crimp into Friday-night parties, which frosted the NFL.) Downtown was brought to a standstill with no weather involved on the Saturday before the NBA All-Star Game in 2003. The 1996 Olympics went off as well as they did because ACOG terrified everyone into taking MARTA, but MARTA, for much of the metro area on a daily basis, isn’t a viable option. When we Cobb Countians fret about the traffic jams that could arise from the Braves’ relocation, we have reason.
Were I an organization considering where to put a major sporting event staged in the winter months, I’d look elsewhere. Imagine if we’d gotten our two inches of snow on Super Bowl Media Day. Imagine adding team buses and media shuttles and Roger Goodell’s limo to the crush that hit our streets Tuesday. I know we just played host to a Final Four that came off nicely, but that was in April. If there’s even a jot of bad weather, we go belly-up. And by “we,” I don’t just mean mayors and governments and school boards and GDOT. I mean all of us.
Saying as much brings no joy. I like living here — always have, always will. But, as Inspector Harry Callahan said, a man has to know his limitations. The downside of living in Atlanta is that we’re bad with traffic and worse with weather. When those failings were fused by two inches of snow, we were at our absolute worst.
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