Single-digit temperatures, black ice patches and bone-chilling winds will blanket much of north Georgia and metro Atlanta by Monday morning and only worsen through Tuesday.
And across the metro area, municipalities and residents were preparing for it.
Temperatures across the upper portion of Georgia were in the 40s late Sunday morning and a winter storm warning had been downgraded to a winter storm advisory. But by midnight, arctic winds are expected to move in, potentially turning moisture left behind from Sunday’s scattered showers into dangerous black ice, Channel 2 Action News meteorologist David Chandley said.
Check today’s full weather report and track changes.
The cold front heading in from Minnesota will cause temperatures to fall rapidly just after midnight, Chandley said, greatly increasing the chances for a “flash freeze” across the metro area. That cool air will be accompanied by high winds reaching gusts of up to 35 mph, which has the potential to make for a miserable commute for some on Monday if roads develop patches of black ice, he said.
While the actual temperature won’t rise above 28 degrees on Monday and will reach a low of 8 degrees by Tuesday, wind chills will likely feel as though it’s 5 to 25 degrees below zero.
It will be “the coldest we’ve been in 11 years,” Chandley said.
More than 25,500 tons of salt, 33,500 tons of gravel, 30,000 gallons of salt brine are in the Georgia Department of Transportation’s storm-fighting arsenal, which the department will begin deploying Sunday night throughout the state.
But even with several contractors and state vehicles at work through the evening, drivers should not expect all interstates and state roads to be passable by rush hour, if the ice blanket proves to be severe. In that case, GDOT plans first to clear, at minimum, two lanes on each interstate, then to clear the most traveled state routes. To help with that, the department has bolstered its stock pile of ice melts and sand, and expanded those reserves to 11 locations along the most traveled stretches of interstate, according to a GDOT statement released Sunday afternoon.
“Our equipment is ready and our crews are resting in anticipation of 12-hour shifts beginning later today,” GDOT spokesman David Spear wrote in an email to the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Sunday.
More than 1,870 GDOT employees have been place on call to deal with the storm and all dump trucks and accompanying vehicles have been equipped with cell phones.
“We will have full staffing available in all of North Georgia,” Spear wrote.
Since the frigid front was forecast last week, DeKalb County officials have been meeting to finalize the county’s storm preparedness plan. Managers from several county departments, including the emergency management agency, public works, public safety and sanitation, met Saturday and Sunday at DeKalb County police headquarters to get direct updates from the National Weather Service on the approaching arctic front.
“We’ll go into 24-hour mode tonight,” said Burke Brennan, chief communications officer. “We’ll send out spotter trucks overnight throughout the county to report the ice cover and then hit those area with our sand and salt trucks. We learned lessons from the storm in 2011.”
That storm essentially brought much of the metro area to a standstill with a thick crust of ice. In some cases, it took more than a week to clear some roads.
Brennan said the county has 400 tons of salt-and-sand mix available to deal with black ice. Rather than purchase expensive salt trucks, DeKalb has outfitted other trucks from the county fleet, such as dump trucks, with spreaders to distribute sand and salt.
“We have reserves and are ready to go,” Brennan said.
In the event of severe ice, the county will first clear roads leading to police and fire stations and hospitals, as well as major roads and bridges that are not under state jurisdiction, Brennan said. The county also plans to keep residents updated through social media and its website.
As the cold air moves into the metro just after midnight, City of Atlanta public works crews will begin pre-treating key overpasses and bridges and major roads to help prevent ice build up. Like DeKalb, the city will focus on thoroughfares leading to and from stations for first responders, then move on to secondary roads and streets as warranted. The city’s 30 sand and salt spreaders will be out with up to 700 tons of gravel and sand, though with little to no snow in the forecast, it’s unlikely Atlanta’s 40 snow plows will be called upon.
Twenty public works crews working 12-hour shifts could be put into action if conditions become as dire as they were during the ice storm that shut down the city three years ago, a whopper that rendered roads impassible and closed schools. Atlanta officials, as well as those with GDOT were roundly criticized then for being ill prepared and slow to respond to the storm’s aftermath.
Over at the Ace Hardware store in the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center in Buckhead, by 11 a.m. Sunday the store had already sold out of outdoor faucet covers, salesman Jay Selts said.
“We had 40 on the shelves on Friday and normally they just sit there, but they are really moving today,” Selts said.
Customers were also stocking up on ice melt, firewood and rock salt, he said.
Temperatures Monday are expected to only reach highs in the upper 20s.
The cold snap, however, is not expected to last past Wednesday, when temperature are expected to hit the high 30s.
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