This year’s winter has been an intense one, and thanks to the “polar vortex,” it’s taken great delight in spilling over its usual bounds and sending major snowstorms much farther south than usual. Birmingham, Alabama got two to three inches of snow, and Atlanta, Georgia was similarly hit. The white stuff paralyzed the region, with traffic gridlocked, plow trucks unable to clear the roads due to abandoned cars, and hapless commuters stranded on freeways overnight. Here in the Motor City, where we’ve got a good eight to twelve inches of snow and traffic is humming along as usual, there’s been some eye-rolling at the dire straits of our neighbors to the south.
Northerners, have some empathy, though. While it’s easy to laugh at the drivers un-used to winter driving who are stuck by just a small amount of snow, the fact of the matter is that it’s not exactly the same kind of snow we get up here. Here in Detroit, the ground has been frozen since December, so the snow falls and piles up. Simple enough. Farther south, however, temperatures have been above freezing, and so the ground is actually warm enough to melt the initial snowfall. As temperatures drop, this melted snow turns to ice, which is then buried by snow thanks to the polar vortex.
Snow on top of ice is bad news for drivers. Even worse, is a lack of preparedness. Even big cities like Atlanta and Birmingham don’t keep much road salt on hand, because situations like this only arise once in a blue moon. Many municipalities down south have sand, which improves traction, but a moderate snowfall renders the sand useless. As a result, a minor snowfall that would be cleared from the roads in less than an hour in Michigan or Ohio can completely paralyze a city down south. Some ice storms have even been severe enough that the plow trucks themselves are unable to move!
John Strangeway, an Atlanta resident (and New Jersey transplant with plenty of “real” winter-driving experience), summed it up nicely: “The snow turned to slush, it was compacted by cars, and then turned to ice. Not just [on] some roads, EVERY ROAD.” As a result cars were unable to climb Atlanta’s many hills, and as the weather worsened, things only got more complicated. “There were cars abandoned due to running out of gas, [cars] stuck in ditches, stuck on medians, or simply just couldn’t get uphill. And that is why I left work at 1:30pm yesterday and got home at 8:30am this morning,” Strangeway said. Regardless of whether the state’s response was sufficiently timely or the ability of Georgians to drive in snow, this was a nasty storm.
Thankfully, the ongoing snow emergency has been largely tragedy-free; it’s just a massive inconvenience for, well, pretty much everyone in Atlanta. And it’s not over yet; the snow that fell and turned to slush on Tuesday is expected to freeze and turn into more ice Wednesday night. Here in Detroit, we can empathize. If Driving Fans could, we’d send you all a set of snow tires!
