CBS Atlanta affiliate WGCL-TV says travel in the city “will be dangerous Tuesday morning, all day Wednesday and Thursday morning,” and in the mountains north of the city, “Travel will be dangerous all day Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning.”
As of early Tuesday, some 1,000 flights had been canceled nationwide, according to FlightAware.com.
Memories of the last storm are still painfully fresh. Students were trapped on buses or at schools and thousands of cars were abandoned along highways as short commutes turned into odysseys. One woman gave birth on a jammed interstate. Officials reported one accident-related death.
This storm could be worse this time. A one-two punch of winter weather was expected for Atlanta and northern Georgia. Rain and snow were forecast Tuesday, followed by sleet and freezing rain Wednesday. Downed power lines and icy roads were a major worry.
Other parts of the South were expected to get hit as well. Alabama, which saw stranded vehicles and had 10,000 students spend the night in schools during the January storm, was likely to get a wintry mix of precipitation. Parts of Mississippi could see 3 inches of snow, and a blast of snow over a wide section of Kentucky slickened roads and closed several school districts. South Carolina, which hasn’t seen a major ice storm in nearly a decade, could get a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of ice.
On Monday, Deal was doing many things differently than he had last month. He opened an emergency operations center and held two news conferences before the storm. In January, Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed did not hold their first news conference until hours after highways were jammed.
When the Jan. 28 storm hit, Deal was at an awards luncheon with Reed, who was named a magazine’s 2014 “Georgian of the Year.”
Reed had just tweeted: “Atlanta, we are ready for the snow.”