"The problem was the big semi trucks..."

When Michelle Nobles left the Atlanta elementary school where she teaches early Tuesday afternoon with her 4-year-old son in tow, she thought she was getting out in time to avoid the worst of the city's snow-snarled traffic.

But a drive home she expected would take five to six hours at the most wound up taking more than four times as long, becoming an overnight odyssey on Atlanta's frozen beltway that ended only after her husband James finally found them after searching I-285 for hours in the middle of the night

"It was getting scary to not know what was going to happen," said Nobles, a fifth-grade teacher at Atlanta's High Point Elementary School. "Everyone was having to turn their cars off to conserve gas. I don’t think I hit the accelerator once for 20 hours."

She decided to leave school with her son around 1:30 p.m., after hearing that students were being sent home. She stayed until about 3 p.m. to help students board buses, thinking "we’ll stop by Target, get a few things, and we’ll be home by midnight," she said.

After the stop there to pick up snacks for her son, things started getting ugly on the roads. "It took an hour to get to Roswell Road from Target, which is a mile," she added. "Once I got on the interstate, it’s three miles to get to the next exit – it took five or six hours to go those three miles."

The main source of the problem, she noted, wasn't commuters in passenger cars. "The problem was the big semi trucks, which there were thousands of them out there," Nobles said. "I watched them slide right in front of me. ... They were the majority of the problem, they blocked the roads."



Read more here: http://www.weather.com/news/atlanta-teacher-21-hours-285-4-year-old-son-rescued-husband-20140129




Michelle Nobles and her son Myles.

 

So.

1. She's a teacher.

2. The goodies she bought at Target just magically appear there when nobody is in that particular isle.

3. Thousands of trucks.

4. All our fault for being unable to move, while the helpless wonderful motorists go around us... Well, duh. Wonder why we can't move?

slappy slap slap time



PS: Go to the weather.com site and click the little sidebar tab that says "Feedback". No need to register if you don't want to.

 

I'm sitting in Mebane, NC. at the petro waiting for the winter storm circus to begin round #2. I'm sure 5 million motorists in the greater Atlanta area will behave differently this time, yes? LOL...