He said cars were moving, slowly but steadily, until 11 p.m. He'd taken side roads, but when his car couldn't make it up a hill, he decided to get on the highway. He'd left his job as a beauty adviser at a mall at 5 p.m., and encountered a traffic jam. Wednesday, right where he'd spent the past 11 hours on Interstate 285. She took off, walking on lawns because the road was too icy.īy Wednesday morning, the sun shone brightly, but many greeted the day where they'd spent the night: their cars, schools, workplaces or a friend's couch.Ĭorey Smith, 23, was still in his compact Chevy Aveo at 10 a.m. Instead, she was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweater and "not very warm, but very cute" boots. That meant she didn't have the usual supplies - boots, blankets, water - that she kept in her vehicle. Neill was driving a rental, a Hyundai Sonata, because her SUV had been rear-ended. So she left the car parked in a subdivision and walked. The hill was closed because it was a sheet of ice. She was three-quarters of a mile away from her friends' home when she ran into a police roadblock. She waited 20 minutes at a station, only to find that it ran out of fuel when she was next in line. By 7:30 p.m., she wrote, "I'm about to give up and find someone nearby with a spare room."įriends in the nearby town of Dunwoody told her they had spare rooms. She kept a running log of her progress on Facebook under the hashtag, Atlantarctica. At one point, she stopped at a Target to use the bathroom and stretch her legs. And that's where she got stuck – for almost seven hours. She left him at his job at 12:05 p.m., anticipating a 20-minute drive to her home from midtown Atlanta to the suburb of Johns Creek.īut after 45 minutes of getting nowhere on Interstate 75, Neill got off the highway and took a side road. Neill's story is typical of the chaos that gripped the region.Ī real estate agent, Neill had lunch with her husband Tuesday as the snow began to fall. "The mistake here is that no one expected the snow to hit as quickly," said Neill, who was stranded in gridlock for 10 hours.
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"It was a like a scene from The Walking Dead," said Maura Neill, 38, referring to the television series about a post-apocalyptic world overtaken by zombies. People in this car-dependent city walked for miles, hunched over and huddled from the cold. The usually bustling roadways in the Atlanta metropolitan area resembled a scene in a post-apocalyptic world during and after Tuesday's snow and ice storm.Ĭars abandoned at odd angles on side streets, thoroughfares and major interstates.
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Many drivers just gave up and walked home or to find shelter where they could - many in stores and other establishments that opened their doors to those in need.Watch Video: Atlanta Snow: Aerial images reveal paralyzed city There's still ice on the roads and the temperature's not going to climb much above freezing today, but authorities in Atlanta want to start reuniting drivers with the thousands of vehicles that were abandoned on highways during the winter storm that blew through Tuesday.Īs we reported, Tuesday's "rush hour from hell" in Atlanta extended well into Wednesday as ice-covered highways and traffic came to a standstill. We're starting to see photos of drivers in Atlanta being reunited with their cars, two days after the ice and snow storm that caused havoc on roads there.Īs The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes, with "more than 2,000 cars still left abandoned on metro Atlanta interstates as of Wednesday evening, and with road conditions now passable city-wide, state officials were turning their focus Thursday to getting those cars safely off the roads." Guard members and police were working to reunite drivers with more than 2,000 cars. Raymond Novak of the Army National Guard helped Lauren Gates (in vehicle) retrieve her car Thursday from the Cumberland Boulevard exit ramp along I-75 North in Atlanta.
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