When I was 14-15 years old, my friend's family owned some property and being teenage boys, obviously we were gonna cover every square inch of that property, looking for....well, anything really! What doesn't intrigue and excite a teenage boy!
One afternoon, we had split up and were just roaming around the woods when I came upon something I had never seen before....I couldn't explain the structure, other than it looked like a tree stump that had been broken off about 3 feet up from the root base and it was in very fragile condition. It looked soft...like the images of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean....structure still in place, but with a simple touch, what looked like it was still a hard surface, just desintigrates into powder.
I took a stick and poked at it (cause that's how a teenage boy checks to see if something is safe or not) and a few ants came pouring out of the hole that was just made. It was an ant hill, the largest ant hill I had ever seen (besides the ones in the Britanica Encylopedias we had at home). So, what comes next is obvious, right? I found a large tree branch that was about the size if a baseball bat and decided it was time for a little batting practice! I swung and nailed the ant hill right in the center and the branch got stuck about half way in, as the sides of this ant hill collapsed and came crumbling all over my shoes, ankles and legs...I reached in to grab my branch back to take another swing, when I felt ants crawling all over my arms, legs...and everywhere else!!!!
I came screaming out of the woods with millions of tiny ants all over my body! No one was home at my friends house and my friends were still in the woods, somewhere. I got undressed and took the water house and doused myself with water, trying to get them off of me. It was a disaster and this reminded me of what happened in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon.
Atlanta is the 11th largest "ant hill" in the US and the city got kicked over on Tuesday with millions of little ants scrambling around to get home!
I started looking up US states and their population numbers and it immediately hit me. This was literally like knocking over a massive ant hill.
People make fun of us in the south for closing schools when it's cold and not a flake of snow on the ground. Most of us have gotten used to the "warnings" of snow and it never comes. But on this day, the snow came but that is not where the problem was. Many of us have relatives in the north and we have been schooled on how to drive in the snow....but what no one can teach is how to drive on ice...the only way to be fully prepared for ice travel is to have a Zamboni ready (See, in the south, we can follow hockey too).
So, you take the icy conditions, the failure to be planned and prepared for another "snow warning," the fact that businesses in the Atlanta Metro area all closed within hours if each other AND many of the county schools releasing students in High, Middle and Elementary all at one time, without any prior notification for many counties...you have mass hysteria on your hands!
Here is the equation I came up with that quite literally that puts it all into perspective and would never happen again statistically, and why a state of emergency was issued for this crazy day!
The metro Atlanta area is made up of some 28 counties with roughly 5.6 million people calling this area home. It is not a large area....about 8,000 square miles.
Let's say that the majority, but not all work in the metro area as well. I was generous here and estimated (on the smaller side) that 4.3 million people work in this area....the number is probably quite larger but maybe some where out of town, some worked at home, etc....
The metro Atlanta area and it's population is the same sum as the entire population in Kentucky or Louisiana or South Carolina or 34 other states in the US....yes I said states, not cities.
So, while your state may get more snow than we ever do and you may never experience the kind of problem we experienced on Tuesday and you make fun of us for it, let me tell you.....the exact same thing would have happened to you.
Imagine taking the entire population of Kentucky or South Carolina....yes, the entire population of either state, who are used to living in about 41,000 square miles of land and drop them in 10,000 square miles of land and tell them all to go home, all at once and oh, by the way, your children have just been released from school and you aren't there to get them and to make matters worse, the roads are gonna be covered in ice.....GO!
Can you picture it? Seriously, can you see the problem?
You have just released the entire state of South Carolina to go home, under not just one or two extreme conditions, more like 4-5 and you have also taken away 3/4 of the land space they are used to and told them to do it in 1/4 of that space. It can be nothing but chaos!!!! Even if the roads had been cleared, it would have still been a nightmare!
It's easy to make fun of someone and say you never would have experienced anything like this where you live and you are exactly right, because you have more land space and less people in just about every possible area in the country, with the exception of maybe 2 or 3 northern cities....who, by the way, get snow regularly....not once every 2-3 years.
Basically, to put this into perspective, this was a once in a lifetime event. I was in Atlanta for the blizzard of 1993 and had fun in that snow....that was the storm of the century (at that time), go look it up.....and nothing like this happened then. This was a fluke situation, poor planning and execution on the government and county levels, and mass hysteria because our children were involved, all happening at one time!
We will be better prepared for something like this going forward! We all learn from mistakes and go forward. Trust me! I haven't touched an ant hill with a branch since I was a teenager, even though I've been tempted to.....but that's a different lesson for a different time!
Now, let's focus our efforts on finding those family members who still haven't returned home and many of those who are still stuck in their vehicles, hotels or strangers houses! My prayers tonight for those who haven't been reunited with their loved ones yet!
