Atlanta calls in National Guard after 2.6" of snow

ATLANTA (CNN) -- [Breaking news update at 12:32 p.m. Wednesday]

 

Five people have died, and 23 people have been injured because of Tuesday's wintry weather in Alabama, the state Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday.

 

 

Asked if officials should have closed roads and urged people to stay home before Tuesday's snowfall, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said Wednesday: \"If we close the city of Atlanta and our Interstate system based on maybes, then we would not be a very productive (state or city).\" He said that some forecasts called for just a dusting of snow. \"It's easy to make judgment calls after the fact, but I daresay there's not anybody in this room that could have (predicted the degree) of the problem that developed.\"

 

[Breaking news update at 12:06 p.m. Wednesday]

 

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal on Wednesday said state government will close again on Thursday because of treacherous road conditions. He asked people to stay off the roads to give crews time to clear them.

 

 

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said officials plan to have all children who stayed in their schools overnight because of treacherous post-snow road conditions \"transported as soon as possible back to their homes.\" Among those still in their schools Wednesday morning, Deal said: About 2,000 in the Fulton County school system and about 400 the in the Atlanta Public Schools. National Guard troops and state police will escort buses as they drop kids home, he said.

 

 

A day after some three inches of snow paralyzed the country's ninth-largest city, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed blamed the resulting gridlock on decisions by schools, business and government to send people home at the same time.

 

\"People were making a lot of independent decisions,\" he told reporters Wednesday. \"What we will do in the future is try to coordinate that, and make a strong recommendation about how that should flow.\"

 

Asked who was at fault, he said, \"I'm not to get into that blame game, but the crisis that we're going through is across the region. So, if you look at anybody's street in any community across the entire region, there's no one who's doing any better job than we're doing in the city of Atlanta.\"

 

In an interview with CNN's Carol Costello, Reed said he has been working non-stop and had accomplished a lot. \"We got 1 million people in the City of Atlanta out of the city; we haven't had any fatalities in the City of Atlanta; we got all of the children who were on school buses in the APS system off of those buses, and I've been communicating with the people of the city on a constant basis.\"

 

But, he said, the timing of the closures was not his call. In the case of when students were sent home, it was up to the Atlanta Public Schools, and the responsibility for clearing the freeways was the state's, he said.

 

\"The bottom line is that I said, if I had my druthers, we would have staggered the closings.\"

 

Reed further noted that the city responded better than it did after a 2011 ice storm, which stopped the city dead in its tracks for four days.

 

The city now has 30 spreaders, 40 snowplows and 70,000 tons of sand and gravel versus just four pieces of equipment three years ago, he said.

 

\"Nothing was done because no one had any equipment,\" he said about the 2011 incident.

 

Asked whether he feels Atlantans are angry with him, he said, \"I don't feel people are angry at me. I feel they have a great deal of frustration.\"

 

By late morning Wednesday, nearly a day after leaving school in a bus, that frustration was continuing to mount for some Atlanta-area students who had still not reached home. Atlanta Public Schools spokeswoman Kimberly Willis Green said Wednesday that \"several hundred students at nine schools\" had sheltered in place.

 

Nine-mile trip becomes nightmare

 

Rebekah Cole left work Tuesday afternoon and was still sitting in traffic 10 hours later -- at 1 a.m. Wednesday. She said she hoped her car wouldn't run out of fuel as she prepared to spend the night in it.

 

She described what she had seen as a \"zombie movie\" -- droves of people got out of their cars and were having conversations.

 

In the dead of night, they talked and walked between cars covered in white powder.

 

Early Wednesday, 10 hours after leaving her office, Cole's nine-mile trip home was barely halfway over.

 

\"If I get gasoline, I will turn the heater on, keep the windows cracked a little bit,\" she said.

 

As she approached the gas station, she saw long lines of other motorists seeking to fill up. Then the fuel light in her car went on.

 

A big problem

 

Similar stories unfolded elsewhere in the Deep South, from Louisiana to North Carolina, as snow, freezing rain and sleet laid down a sheet of thin ice in a region unfamiliar with such weather.

 

Motorists set out for home at the first sight of snow, clotting the streets.

 

Georgia and Alabama were hit especially hard. Governors in both states declared states of emergency.

 

A 60-year-old woman died Tuesday afternoon in Senoia, Georgia, when her van drove into a ditch and overturned, the Georgia State Patrol said.

 

\"I'm eight months' pregnant and have my 3-year-old with me,\" Atlanta-area resident Katie Norman Horne said on SnowedOutAtlanta, a Facebook page set up to help stranded motorists.

 

\"We've been in the car for over 12 hours. We are fine on gas but is anyone near on the road and might happen to have any food or some water?\"

 

In Atlanta, 940 accidents were confirmed, with more than 100 of them involving injuries, the Georgia public safety commissioner said.

 

In Alabama, at least five people died Tuesday in weather-related traffic accidents. The governor deployed 350 National Guard troops to help motorists.

 

Stranded travelers sought refuge at strangers' homes and in schools and businesses. Home Depot opened 26 stores to travelers overnight in Alabama and Georgia.

 

Unheeded warnings

 

Forecasters had warned that Atlanta was expecting 1 to 2 inches. But in the morning, when the snow had not arrived, people went to work and school, like nothing was coming.

 

Then it did.

 

At about the same time early Tuesday afternoon, schools, businesses and government offices sent home students and workers as the streets began to ice.

 

Motorists thought they could deal with it. They couldn't. The spin-outs began.

 

Unexpected eeriness

 

Mariano Castillo, a news editor at CNN.com, got a firsthand view of the chaos from behind the steering wheel when he joined the exodus from downtown trying to get home.

 

\"The weather was a great equalizer,\" he said after sitting in traffic for nine hours. \"(It) didn't matter if you had a late model Mustang or a beater van or a Brink's armored car, your wheels were spinning fruitlessly on the ice.\"

 

Abandoned cars and stranded big rigs stood in what looked like vehicle graveyards made more eerie by the sound of would-be commuters talking and walking on the interstate, he said.

 

The experience was mystifying to Stephen Gianopulos, 40, who moved to Georgia this month from Chicago. Shortly before 6 p.m., he left his office in Atlanta's Buckhead section. But, after sitting in his car for 20 minutes without getting anywhere, he went back to his office. \"I couldn't understand why nobody was moving; the streets weren't icy yet,\" he said.

 

At 7:30 p.m., he tried it again, completing the 6-mile commute in one and a half hours.

 

In Chicago, the dusting \"would be a non-issue,\" Gianopulos said. \"It wouldn't even make news.\"

 

Good Samaritans

 

The catastrophe brought out the goodness in many people.

 

\"I got some tea from some kids, from them and their mom,\" Cole said. But that soon resulted in another problem -- there was no place to stop for a bathroom break. She quit drinking fluids.

 

But it was a mere inconvenience compared with the situation of a woman in labor in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs.

 

Traffic jams blocked her way to the hospital and kept paramedics from reaching her, so -- with the aid of a police officer -- she delivered her daughter Tuesday evening.

 

Mira Lowe, a CNN editor, watched as people left their cars to help each other get unstuck.

 

\"A trio of guys in hoodies walking asked a young woman sitting in a car on the side of the road if she needed a push,\" she said. \"There was a sense that we are all in this together.\"

 

Caretakers

 

In Alabama, teachers stayed in their classrooms to care for stranded students.

 

The weather forced 4,500 students to spend the night in school buildings in Hoover, Alabama. And 800 students were stuck overnight in schools in Birmingham, officials said.

 

\"Staff is staying with them, feeding them,\" Birmingham City Schools Superintendent Craig Witherspoon said. \"High schools are showing movies.\"

 

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley urged parents unable to reach their children to remain calm.

 

\"I know the anxiety there,\" Bentley said. \"I want to reassure all the parents that if you trust your teacher to take care of your child during the day, they will be taken care of tonight.\"

 

At the Alabama Waldorf School, about 20 students spent the night at a nearby home after state officials urged parents not to drive in the snow.

 

\"They're doing really well,\" Administrator Lisa Grupe said. \"They're just having an extended play date. We all looked like ducks walking in the snow together.\"

 

On Twitter, a second-grade teacher said about 150 students and 50 staff members were stranded at Greystone Elementary School in Hoover.

 

Not that they were all complaining.

 

\"Very exciting day,\" teacher Carol McLaughlin tweeted late Tuesday afternoon. \"... The kids are being real troopers. : ) I think they think it's an adventure.\"

 

Stay home

 

Reed, Atlanta's mayor, urged residents to stop driving for at least a day to give crews a chance to clean up.

 

\"The next 24 hours, I really need folks to stay home,\" he said. \"Go home, give us some time.\"

 

Early Wednesday, Reed said 30 salt trucks had been deployed.

 

Until they clear the roads, motorists may be stuck on ice for a while.