6) Government employees do not know how to read a weather forecast. Prepare accordingly.
Yes - and the further the responsibility is away from local government, the worse the response
People in the south need to stay home in these situations. If it doesn’t happen more than once every decade or so its worth the lost revenue for a day.
I was feeling sorry for them at first because they really don’t know how to deal with snow. Now, it’s getting downright funny.
“YOU are ultimately responsible for yourself”
No offense to our Southern brothers and sisters, who I hope are coping as best they can, but this is one reason many of us appreciate the rigors of a four-season climate. We are tested every winter, and we know that consequences of not being prepared and heads-up can be life-threatening. It’s like anything else, the more you practice, the better you get at a thing, and here in the midwest, we practice once a year!
I’ve watched this mess for hours and hours. My biggest take away from all this besides late action by powers that be is that all these cars on the interstates are being blocked or hindered by semis that get stuck and cross-laned.
I think that next time, the surrounding Atlanta county police on every one of the interstates should FORCE all semis to the side of the road there for 12 hours or so. This would have allowed more cars to get home.
My 2 cents.
Standard rule I learned in Alaska back in 1968. If driving, keep TWO cans of STERNO in the car, matches, and a sterno stove. Blankets, hard candy and other dry food, Add a good sleeping bag.
Furthermore, when the weather got particularly nasty, we just stayed home. I see some "back in my day" posters in these threads yapping about how school never closed and they had to walk six miles blah, blah, blah.
There were more "snow days" when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. People stayed home from work too unless they had a critical job function like working in a hospital or being a police officer. If they had a typical office job, they stayed home and they didn't have to wait for their boss to call them. It was a common sense thing.
I think technology has worked against us in some ways. People now see nothing wrong with going to school in flip-flops or to work with just a light jacket and no gloves or hat on a sub-zero day. If they get in a jam, they only have to make a cellphone call and help is on the way. We are too complacent and we assume that we can now disregard all weather conditions because we'll never be in danger.
I'm a seasoned New England driver and our roads can handle a few inches of snow - it's routine. But I was on a business trip in Nashville, TN once when it snowed and I knew better to just stay in the hotel because I know the chaos that would result down there with just an inch or two of snow. Sure enough, one of my co-workers who was also down there insisted on taking his rental car out and promptly got in a fender bender and was stuck out on I-40 for hours. Never made it to the branch office.
People in the Deep South should just stay home when it snows. In almost all cases, it will be melted within 24 hours. Not worth the risk to be out there endangering yourself and others.
As this is written, Atlanta is still in the throes of another winter weather situation. The TV is filled with images of major highways littered with abandoned vehicles. Many of their owners are stranded in make-shift shelters until warmer weather makes the roads passable again.
The governor and other officials just concluded a news conference to explain how the mess unfolded and that they’ve learned much from this experience.
One of the lessons they “learned” is that, once the potential severity of this event became obvious, dismissing public and private employees all at once to try to get home was a really bad idea as it is many of their abandoned vehicles now clogging the roads, making it impossible for the salt and sand trucks to do their thing.
How unfortunate that so many of these state officials and private business management folks seem to be slow learners. We’ve had a number of these events in years past and the result is the same: Hundreds of thousands of gallons of expensive fuel burned, multiple thousands of people stranded, some folks even dying in accidents or from exposure, etc.
There IS a sensible solution for at least SOME of these folks and the problems they faced, a solution that could also seriously curtail the massive and growing year round Atlanta traffic rush hour gridlock and, just incidentally, conserve that precious fuel and reduce the CO2 and other emissions the Algore and the other “climate change” charlatans insist causes “global warming” (despite growing evidence that they’re nuts).
In the 60s and 70s, Tom Peters, an American writer on business management practices, wrote and spoke extensively on what he called the “Electronic Cottage.” It was a very sensible proposal made possible by the coming of age of the electronic revolution.
In a nutshell, his proposal, even MORE sensible now that the electronic revolution has had 50 years to mature, is that, unless a worker’s occupation absolutely required that he leave his home each day to drive to where he performs his duties, the need for him to do so was becoming unnecessary. If he or she was one of the growing number of INFORMATION workers from whom an employer needed mainly or only an INFORMATION WORK PRODUCT, that product could just as easily be created in an “electronic cottage” in some small portion of his or her home.
If I have to explain the societal benefits of that, please stop reading now as you may be one of Obama’s no/low information folks and wouldn’t grasp how it would save vast amounts of valuable energy resources and human time as folks no longer would need to sit in stop and go rush hours breathing noxious fumes for several hours each day. If you are one of those whose job requires you to navigate a rush hour twice a day, try to imagine how YOUR rush hour experience might improve with half or more of the vehicles removed from the highways?
Speaking of noxious fumes, I sincerely believe that these big city rush hours and those noxious fumes are damaging our brains, exacerbating the dumbing down begun in the government schools to the point where 47% or so of us actually believed the BS laid down my Obama and put an unvetted, unqualified, Marxist community organizer in office – TWICE – and still haven’t noticed that his every act is designed to destroy America.
(I’m tempted to raise the issue of school busing but that’s a topic for another rant.)
There is another reason why Peters’ common sense proposal has not gained more traction. That is the ego driven flaw that dictates that the corporate guy who makes it up the food chain to a corner office feels the need to be able to periodically stroll from that office and gaze around at a mass of cubicle enclosed fellow humans and know that they are “his” people. Their absence from his sight would cause him to feel less important and secure.
And, speaking of security, it COULD come to pass that those above him in that food chain might begin to question just why HE is in that corner office. Can’t have that sort of thing now, can we, lest it ripple up and down the entire food chain.
So, while I don’t hold out much hope that the electronic cottage with all its many benefits will get any serious consideration, it is possible that coming events here might force it upon us.
Sometimes doo doo happens. Sometimes the going gets tough. Americans use to just deal with it.
Now we seem to have to micro analyze every damned thing.
btw, I lived in Atlanta in the 80’s. Got a wife and got us gone. The area did not comport with the life style we aspired to.