"For the governor and the mayor, this week’s storm provided a chance at political redemption. Along with endless looping footage of stranded motorists, the first storm came with other lousy optics—Reed and Deal onstage at a Ritz Carlton luncheon at the time flurries hit, Deal posing with Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara look-alikes at a Georgia tourism event, Reed carping with Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe.
For the rest of us, the prospect of another storm just brought weary resignation: more days of lost work, closed schools and disrupted commutes. While Deal and Reed huddled with their emergency commanders, Atlantans rushed to the supermarket, clearing every Kroger of its bread, milk and eggs, provisioning themselves as though in preparation for a second siege by Sherman.
All that preparation paid off. There was no gridlock this time—because everyone just stayed home. On the day the last storm hit, roads in and out of downtown Atlanta already were jammed. At 3 p.m. that Tuesday afternoon, a colleague and I walked out to our parking lot to gauge our prospects of being able to head home. The street outside our lot was jammed, with cars, trucks and buses idling, the route to the freeway ramps backed up for miles.
This Tuesday, Feb. 11, Atlanta was a ghost town. Schools and universities had already announced closures. Government agencies and businesses called for telecommuting. I cruised into work on streets that were eerily empty. When I left downtown that afternoon around 4 p.m. the only other vehicles in the parking deck were a pair of emergency trucks. When the actual ice and snow hit late Tuesday night, metro Atlanta was hunkered down at home.
La suite:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/how-atlanta-survived-icepocalypse-ii-103534.html?hp=t1#.Uv_FYPl5PAw
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