Stranded drivers get aid

Helicopters, Humvees search icy interstates

Traffic backs up Wednesday on icy Interstate 285 north of Atlanta. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said National Guard vehicles were taking aid to motorists stranded on the city’s snarled freeway system.
Traffic backs up Wednesday on icy Interstate 285 north of Atlanta. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said National Guard vehicles were taking aid to motorists stranded on the city’s snarled freeway system.

ATLANTA - Helicopters took to the skies Wednesday to search for stranded drivers while Humvees delivered food, water and gas - or rides home - to people who were stuck on roads after a winter storm walloped the Deep South.

      

Students spent the night on buses or at schools, commuters abandoned their cars or slept in them, and interstates turned into parking lots. The problems started when schools, businesses and government offices all let out at the same time on Tuesday.As people waited in gridlock, snow accumulated, the roads froze, cars ran out of gas and tractor-trailers jackknifed, blocking equipment that could have treated the roads.

Nationwide, more than 3,200 flights were canceled Wednesday, with Atlanta leading all other airports with 999 flights into and out of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport having been canceled by midafternoon, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware

Delta Airlines - which has a large presence on Arkansas runways - reported that more than 1,800 of its flights were canceled nationwide.

Shane Carter, spokesman for Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field in Little Rock, said more than 20 flights were canceled there Wednesday, the majority of them Delta flights. The airline is the second-largest carrier for the airport, with more than 40,000 passengers each month.

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AP/The Pensacola News Journal

Ice covers the Escambia Bay Bridge on Interstate 10 just east of Pensacola, Fla., which remained closed Wednesday.

Carter added that the Little Rock airport is seeing the effects from cancellations at three major airports: Atlanta, Houston and Chicago.

Scott Van Laningham, spokesman for the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Highfill, said the effect there hadn’t been as great, and the airport had seen only three canceled flights so far.

Both Van Laningham and Carter credited the airlines’ practices of sending flight cancellations by email and text messages with reducing the number of travelers caught by surprise after arriving at the state’s airports.

“There is nobody sleeping at the airport,” Van Laningham said. “Not yet.”

Carter said the fact that Little Rock is not a hub also works in the airport’s favor.

“We do not have passengers who are basically stranded. Those who do come to the airport are close enough to turn around and drive back home,” Carter said.

The economic effect, however, will still be felt for days afterward, Carter added. The reduction in air traffic has meant a loss of related revenue, such as parking fees, food, merchandise purchases and landing fees.

“But we want airlines to operate in the safest manner and certainly do not mind the financial loss to ensure crew and passenger safety. There’s nothing more important. Just as the airport’s main goal is to operate a safe airfield, we join the airlines as they also make safety their top priority,” Carter said.

In the Deep South, it wasn’t clear exactly how many people were still stranded on the roads a day after the storm paralyzed the region. By Wednesday afternoon, traffic began moving around Atlanta, though it was still slow going in some areas. The timing of when things would clear and thaw was also uncertain because temperatures were not expected to be above freezing.

“We literally would go 5 feet and sit for two hours,” said Jessica Troy, who along with a co-worker spent more than 16 hours in her car before finally getting home late Wednesday morning.

Their total trip was about 12 miles.

“I slept for an hour, and it was not comfortable,” Troy said. “Most people sat the entire night with no food, no water, no bathroom. We saw people who had children. It was a dire situation.”

The rare snowstorm deposited mere inches of snow in Georgia and Alabama, but there were more than 1,000 fender-benders. At least a dozen deaths were reported from traffic accidents and a mobile-home fire.

Georgia state troopers also responded to more than 1,460 crashes between Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening and said more than 175 injuries had been reported.

Atlanta officials said 239 children spent Tuesday night aboard school buses, and thousands stayed overnight in their schools.

By Wednesday night, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said all Atlanta-area schoolchildren were back home with their parents.

Elsewhere, Virginia’s coast had up to 10 inches of snow, South Carolina had about 4 inches, and highways were shut down in Louisiana.

In North Carolina, coastal areas where people normally stroll along beaches or play golf in late January, beaches were nearly deserted after forecasters predicted 4 to 8 inches of snow. But the actual snowfall, mixed with sleet, was less - under 2 inches in coastal Wilmington, N.C. Manteo up the coast to the Outer Banks received 6 inches. Inland, some eastern county areas received five-eighths of an inch.

The storm was caused by a burst of Arctic air that swept across the central U.S., triggering ice and snow storms across the south and subzero temperatures throughout the Midwest.

In Atlanta and Birmingham on Wednesday, thousands of cars lined interstate shoulders, abandoned at the height of the traffic jam. Some sat askew at odd angles, apparently left after crashes. Some commuters pleaded for help via cellphones while still holed up in their cars, while others trudged miles home.

A Facebook page called Snowed Out Atlanta was created as a kind of emergency switchboard for people trying to help friends and family members stuck on the road.

The posts became more desperate as dawn began to break. “Anyone know of an open home depot, fire station or anything else north of Acworth but close to 75??? A very elderly couple (late 90s) & their grandson need to get off the road asap!” one person wrote about 6 a.m.

Some employers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield in Alabama had hundreds of people sleeping in offices overnight. Workers watched movies on their laptops, and office cafeterias gave away food.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley’s office said rescuers and medics in helicopters were flying over Jefferson and Shelby counties conducting search and-rescue missions.

Atlanta once again found itself unprepared to deal with the chaos - despite assurances that city officials had learned their lessons from a 2011 ice storm. Some residents were angry that more precautions weren’t taken this time around and schools and other facilities weren’t closed ahead of time.

“They are claiming that they didn’t know the weather was going to be bad,” Jeremy Grecco of Buford said in an email. “They failed to dispatch these trucks prior to the road conditions becoming unfavorable.”

Officials from schools and the state said weather forecasts indicated that the area would not see more than a dusting of snow and that it didn’t become clear until late Tuesday morning that those were wrong.

However, the National Weather Service explicitly cautioned on Monday that snow-covered roads “will make travel difficult.” And around 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, the agency issued a winter-storm warning for metro Atlanta and cautioned people not to travel except in an emergency.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed took some of the blame for schools, businesses and government all letting out at the same time, and he said they should have staggered their closings.

“I’m not thinking about a grade right now,” Reed said when asked about the city’s response. “I’m thinking about getting people out of their cars.”

Deal, the governor, who faces re-election in November, fended off criticism about the government’s response. He said emergency officials rescued stranded children on buses first and aimed to make contact with all stranded drivers by Wednesday.

“Our goal today is that there will not be anybody stranded in a vehicle on our interstates that has not been offered the opportunity to go to a place of safety and security,” Deal said at a news conference.

Georgia, along with the Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi, remained under states of emergency Wednesday. Deal said state government offices will be closed today and urged other businesses to keep their employees home.

But weather experts said officials’ response should have been faster given the warnings.

“They could be prepared. The mayor and the governor got on TV yesterday and said, ‘Oh, this wasn’t expected.’ And that’s not true. I mean, we were talking about this Monday, that this was going to happen. They took a gamble.They didn’t want to pre-treat the roads. I don’t think they wanted to spend the money,” Al Roker said on NBC’s Today Show. “This was poor planning on the mayor’s part and the governor’s part, pure and simple.”

Ryan Willis, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Peachtree City, Ga., said temperatures were below freezing Wednesday and were to dip back into the teens overnight. Today will offer much warmer weather, around the upper 30s to lower 40s.

Information for this article was contributed by Ray Henry, Russ Bynum, Kate Brumback, Phillip Lucas, Bill Cormier, Bill Barrow, Don Schanche, Mike Graczyk, Bruce Smith, Kevin McGill, Stacey Plaisance, Jay Reeves, Brock Vergakis, Janet McConnaughey, Reid Wilson, David Crary, Christina A. Cassidy and staff writers of The Associated Press; by Kim Severson and Alan Blinder of The New York Times; by Jeannie Roberts of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; by David Zucchino and Lisa Mascaro of The Los Angeles Times; and by Michael Buteau of Bloomberg News.

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Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/30/2014

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