Page 6 - I 285 News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

And across the south, a rare dusting of snow from florida to virginia beach. but enough to make roadways impassable and shut down highways and bridges causing thousands of accidents. people forced to shelter in place. many of them in stores. officials in georgia under fire and the governor at mitted admitted errors were made. >> we all have lessons to learn here. >> reporter: some blaming the national weather service saying the snow was forecast further south, but admitted trucks weren't mandated to have chains. many of them jackknifed clogging roadways. doesn't seem all of atlanta rushed to g...

I don't know what modeling they were looking at. >> a lot of pushback from the meteorologists and al roker talked about his projects for the storm yesterday. >> the mayor and the governor got on tv yesterday and said, oh, this wasn't expected and that is not true. we were talking about this monday that this was going to happen. they took a gamble. they didn't want to pretreat the roads. i don't think they wanted to spend the money and do what they needed to. then they told -- everybody started going home right around noon. by 1:30, i-285 and i-75 and i-85 was a parking lot. this was poor plann...

Their cars in the ice and snow, that can't come soon enough. for most of the deep south, this freak winter snowstorm dropped mere inches. but that was enough to grind parts of it to a complete gridlock. as know and ice built up, traffic snarled. officials took some of that blame after schools and businesses and government all went out at the same time. >> we don't want to be accused of crying wolf. because if we had been wrong, y'all would have been in here saying, you know how many millions of dollars you cost the economy? >> reporter: thousands of crashes, some of them deadly, backed up traf...

Make it home with her three daughters. city officials say there are definitely lessons to learn about how they responded to this ice tomorrow. but that the response was better than after a similar storm in 2011. that one brought this town to a stand still for four days, ari. >> wow. thank you for that report and stay safe. joining us now by phone is joe schmidt. he's a truck driver from indiana who's still stuck in atlanta on i-285. joe, welcome. you were driving from miami yesterday afternoon. you got stuck. how long have you been stuck? >> i left miami yesterday morning, and i hit the atlant...

Some sort of weather watch or warning. the carolinas, georgia, alabama, louisiana and mississippi are under a state of emergency. and this morning, nearly 1,000 flights are already canceled. the weather forced more than 1,000 kids in alabama and georgia to spend the night at school. there, staff and students had access to meals and blankets. >> we have several major areas of concern because some of the schools had not released their students early enough in the day for them to be able to get home in the normal fashion before the roads became icy and the school buses could not run. >> just a fe...