Thursday evening into Friday morning, Georgia experienced wet weather along with below freezing temperatures.
On Friday morning, there was a multi-car pile up on a major freeway going through Atlanta. And by multi-car – I’m talking two digits numbers. Black ice was blamed.
On my way into work, I passed THREE cars off the road. Thank you Jesus, they were one car accidents and all of them were basically spin outs that hit nada. There was one wreck – fender-vender. No injuries, except to bumpers.
All of these could be attributed to black ice.
It was the talk of the news radio networks all weekend. I listened to departments whine and fuss – well there wasn’t any salt down because we didn’t receive word from the weather service it was going to be a problem.
And one department was blaming another department. It was someone else’s fault.
And I was reminded why we were the laughing stock of the world last February when we had snow flakes and our infrastructure imploded on itself.
What has happened to our common sense? Must we rely on another ‘department’ to tell us what common sense should?
It RAINED on Thursday. Temperatures DROPPED below freezing Thursday night.
Me, with NO meteorological logic knows this means ice and common sense told me to leave early for the school and drive slowly and carefully, especially in curves where there were a lot of trees!
Is this so difficult?
Even Guy thinks we’re stupid.
That’s bad.
zee's muse 
This is a prejudiced comment, but having lived in the north and the middle and the south of the US, I tend to feel that the southerners do not take the weather seriously enough, or rather, the possibility that bad weather will be truly dangerous. Maybe we in the north take it too seriously …
We don’t. At all. The truth is, snowfall is extremely difficult to predict and we are normally told to await a blizzard and it doesn’t come.
Or better yet – we have enough Yankees who have transplanted who think us going berserk at an inch of snow, is just a great joke. Winter before last, we had a substantial snowfall the first week of January and the entire northern half of the state closed down. Mom and I walked to the little convenience store behind the house, just in time to hear a traveler from New England lambast the hell out of us – Why were we upset over… THIS? We’re just insane!
We seem to be in a cycle. When we moved here in 1980, there were several consecutive winters where we had ice and snow every year. One. Never more than one, just… one. And then we go years with none. Soooooo….
I suppose you could say bad weather is more erratic down here — but in WI, everyone I know has “winter stuff” in their cars at this time of year — usually at least a blanket and a heavy bag of salt or some other ballast. Often a flashlight. In some cases water and food. In FL we have hurricane risk and there’s a list of recommended supplies to have but if you ask people, most of them blow it off …