Georgia National Guardsman command sergeant major friend Grisham c joins fellow soldiers who help people out of their cars stranded snow in Atlanta, Georgia on January 29, 2014. A rare storm of ice turned Atlanta into a slippery mess Wednesday, stranding thousands for hours on frozen roads and raise questions about how he prepared for city leaders and handle the cold spell that hit the southern United States.
By Erin McClam, writer, NBC NewsThe Governor of Georgia Nathan Deal on Thursday blamed on Thursday because the State's slow response to a snowstorm that left stranded for more than 24 hours on interstate highways would prevent people, and their senior emergency management officer, said flatly: "I have a bad".
Deal pledged to reporters that the State would be more aggressive in responding to the threats of the future time.
"I'm not going to look for a scapegoat," he said. "I am the Governor. It ended up with me. I accept responsibility for it, but I also accept the responsibility of being able to take the corrective actions that come in the future."
He added: "we will take those weather warnings more seriously."
Facing criticism for the response of the city an unusual winter storm, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said that while they didn't have the experience to deal with the unusual weather, their efforts have made 80 percent of the city passable roads.
Charley English, head of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, said that it had made a mistake to activate state emergency response center six hours later, much once the national weather service upgraded its Atlanta winter storm alert on Tuesday morning.
"I made a terrible mistake, and put the Governor in a difficult situation," he said.
Thousands of people were stuck, without any food or water on interstate highways in the vicinity of Atlanta after the storm struck on Tuesday afternoon. Thousands of schoolchildren were also abandoned overnight in their schools or on a bus trapped in the road.
In Atlanta on Thursday, the people of the National Guard helped to recover abandoned cars that littered the Interstate from Atlanta. Meanwhile, the Mayor and the Governor struggled with the political consequences.
Mayor Kasim Reed said people until the snow began to fall on Tuesday, in a message on Twitter: "Atlanta, ready for snow".
On Thursday, acknowledged that the authorities made a mistake by not wobble your orders for people to go home - the companies first, then private schools, then the Government employees. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of people pour on interstate highways at the same time.
But Reed suggests, in a couple of interviews of MSNBC NBC and today morning Joe, "that she was being unfairly blamed for traffic that clogged the roads out of the city limits.
"I think that we have to work much harder in coordination," he told MSNBC. But stressed: "roads are not the responsibility of the city".
It was the last episode of finger-pointing after the storm. "On Wednesday, the Governor enraged meteorologists calling the storm"unexpected"and saying that no-one"could have predicted"the extent and the magnitude of the problem".
In fact, the national weather service issued a winter for Atlanta storm alert on 3:38 on Tuesday, 12 hours before the worst of the traffic.
Daniel Shirey / Getty ImagesAtlanta student David Hunter and his mother Demetra Dobbins go up a ramp to exit along the North-75 on Wednesday.
Cities in the North are more accustomed to snow storms, and in places like New York, powerful mayors have the lone authority for sal-orden spreaders and plows on the streets.
But the Atlanta area, as noted frustrated experts, is a mosaic of regional Governments that often do not get along with others.
It also has a deeply entrenched car culture and a mass transit system that serves only a fraction of people 5.5 million of the metropolitan area. Voters across the region defeated a sales tax of a penny that would have strengthened regional transit in 2012.
After a snowstorm limping Atlanta in 2011, Reed, the Mayor of Atlanta, wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he had learned an important lesson about the collaboration and cooperation.
"We will work faster and smarter to offer the kind of response that our residents require and deserve," he wrote.
"Morning Joe" asked why authorities not had worked better together this time, he said: "I think we all have responsibility".
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This story was originally posted at Thu 30 January 2014 2:46 PM EST
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