DURHAM, N.C. — Southerners shoveled, scraped and plowed their way Thursday out of a snowy deep freeze that caused a standstill across much of a region accustomed to mild winters.
At least 15 people died, including a baby in a car that slid off an icy overpass outside New Orleans, and a 6-year-old boy who sledded onto a roadway in Virginia.
Authorities across the South urged drivers to stay off treacherous roads. Louisiana highways remained closed and New Orleans residents were avoiding showers to restore pressure to a system plagued by frozen pipes. Atlanta was slowly returning to normal after being frozen in its tracks by about an inch of snow.
All this raises a familiar question: Why do severe winters seem to catch southerners unprepared? Experts on disaster planning say it’s tough to justify maintaining fleets of snow plows when the weather’s only occasionally nasty.
“People are putting their money, their resources and their planning time where it’s most necessary, and that has to do with an understanding of what the risks are in any place,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
Still, “if you get even a modest amount of snow, you can’t be caught completely unprepared for that either,” he said.
North Carolina is accustomed to getting some snow, but people were surprised at the ferocity of this storm, which dumped as much as an inch per hour from the mountains to the coast and piled a foot of snow in parts of Durham County.
Mark Foley, 24, struggled to start his pickup in the 15-degree air before he was able to go pick up an in-home health aide for his disabled father.
“My lock was frozen, so I couldn’t even unlock the door. So I had to use some warm water,” he said. “It’s more snow than we thought we were going to get.”
State transportation officials had 2,200 trucks out plowing and salting a day after the storm hit. Despite this, troopers responded to more than 2,700 crashes and police reported hundreds more as North Carolina’s five most populous cities all saw significant snow.
John Rhyne, a maintenance engineer with the N.C. Department of Transportation in the central part of the state, said he’s proud of his crews’ ability to clear roads in the region even after this week’s daunting totals.