'Absolute cop-out': Heated forecasters blow back at Ga. officials' weather blame game

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"There was plenty of time to make those adjustments for any kind of snow removal" in Atlanta, NBC's Al Roker said.

By M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer, NBC News

Under fire from Georgia government officials caught flatfooted by the winter storm that socked the South this week, weather forecasters are mad as heck and want them know: They're not going to take it anymore.

With the capital city, Atlanta, paralyzed by less than 3 inches of snow, Georgia officials complained that they weren't warned what was on the way Tuesday:

"We have been confronted with an unexpected storm that hit the metropolitan area," Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said Tuesday night.Wednesday, he said, "There's not anybody in this room who could have predicted to the degree and magnitude the problem that developed."Later Wednesday, he said: "If we closed the city of Atlanta and our interstate system based on maybes, then we would not be a very productive government or a city. We can't do it based on the maybes."Asked why the city didn't deploy sanders and plows until eight hours after the National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning early Tuesday, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed called such criticisms "Monday morning quarterbacking."

The National Weather Service wouldn't comment, but other experts were quick to leap to its defense.

"Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong," Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society, said of critics who alleged that the weather service botched its forecasts. 

In a post on a blog he set up Wednesday specifically to defend the performance of forecasting services this week, Shepherd pointed out that the weather service issued watches and warnings well before the storm arrived, providing plenty of time for Georgia officials to make the right decisions.

"Yet, as soon as I saw what was unfolding with kids being stranded in schools, 6+ hour commutes, and other horror stories, I knew it was coming, I knew it. Some in the public, social medial or decision-making positions would 'blame' the  meteorologists," Shepherd wrote in a post titled "An Open Thank You to Meteorologists in Atlanta."

NBC News meteorologist Al Roker agreed.

"The mayor and the governor got on TV yesterday  and said all this wasn't expected, and that's not true," Roker said Wednesday on TODAY.

Roker and other meteorologists pointed out that the weather service issued its warning for metro Atlanta at 3:38 a.m. Tuesday — meaning "they were warned about it, and they should have been prepared for it," Roker said. "It's a shame. It really is."

Scrolling through the weather service's reports for the last few days reveals that its forecasters were sounding the alarm of possible "widespread ice accumulations" across the South as early as Saturday — "expanding into the Southeast U.S. Tuesday into Wednesday":

National Weather Service

Which is exactly what happened.

On Monday — a day before the first snowflake fell — the weather service warned of snow and possible heavy snow right across north Georgia:

National Weather Service

Which is also exactly what happened.

At 3:22 p.m. Monday, the weather service issued an advisory that specifically there was a potential "for 2 inches of snow and up to a half-inch of sleet from Atlanta to Athens."

Once again: exactly what happened.

"It absolutely breaks my heart," said Jim Cantore, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel.

"There are certainly chances that you take with this inexact science of forecasting a winter storm warning," Cantore said Wednesday. But this time, "the National Weather Service was absolutely spot-on with this."

"It's just an absolute cop-out," he said, telling Georgia officials: 

"Admit you're wrong. Admit you took a chance to save some money and you blew it. You blew it. And now, people are suffering, unfortunately, in the city of Atlanta."

South struggles back to normal as officials point fingers after snowstorm

Christopher Aluka Berry / Christopher Aluka Berry / Reuters

Georgia National Guardsman Command Sgt. Maj. Buddy Grisham (C) is joined by fellow troops as they help people get their stranded cars out of the snow in Atlanta, Georgia January 29, 2014. A rare ice storm turned Atlanta into a slippery mess on Wednesday, stranding thousands for hours on frozen roadways and raising questions about how city leaders prepared for and handled the cold snap that slammed the U.S. South.

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal on Thursday took responsibility Thursday for the state’s slow response to a snowstorm that left people stranded for more than 24 hours on gridlocked interstates, and his top emergency management official said flatly: “I got this one wrong.”

Deal pledged to reporters that the state would be more aggressive in responding to future weather threats.

“I’m not going to look for a scapegoat,” he said. “I am the governor. The buck stops with me. I accept the responsibility for it, but I also accept the responsibility of being able to make corrective actions as they come into the future.”

He added: “We will take those weather warnings more seriously.”

Facing criticism over the city's response to an unusual winter storm, Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed said that while they did not have the experience to deal with the unusual weather, their efforts have made 80 percent of the city's roads passable.

Charley English, head of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, said he had made a mistake by activating the state’s emergency response center six hours too late, long after the National Weather Service upgraded its winter storm alert for Atlanta on Tuesday morning.

“I made a terrible mistake, and I put the governor in an awful position,” he said.

Thousands of people were stuck, without food and water, on the interstates in and around Atlanta after the storm struck on Tuesday afternoon. Thousands of schoolchildren were also marooned overnight in their schools or on buses trapped on the road.

In Atlanta on Thursday, the National Guard helped people retrieve abandoned cars that littered the Atlanta interstates. Meanwhile, the mayor and governor struggled with the political fallout.

Mayor Kasim Reed assured people on Tuesday, in a message on Twitter before the snow began to fall: “Atlanta, we are ready for the snow.”

On Thursday, he acknowledged that authorities made a mistake by not staggering their orders for people to go home — schools first, then private businesses, then government employees. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people poured onto the interstates at the same time.

But Reed suggested, in a pair of interviews on NBC’s TODAY and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” that he was being unfairly blamed for traffic that clogged highways outside the city limits.

“I think we need to work much harder on coordination,” he said on MSNBC. But he stressed: “The highways are not the responsibility of the city.”

It was the latest episode of finger-pointing after the storm. On Wednesday, the governor infuriated meteorologists by calling the storm “unexpected” and saying that nobody “could have predicted “the degree and magnitude of the problem.”

In fact, the National Weather Service issued a winter storm alert for Atlanta at 3:38 a.m. on Tuesday, 12 hours before the worst of the traffic set in.

Daniel Shirey / Getty Images

Atlanta student David Hunter and his mother Demetra Dobbins walk up an exit ramp along I-75 North on Wednesday.

Cities in the North are much more accustomed to snowstorms, and in places like New York, powerful mayors have the single-handed authority to order salt-spreaders and plows onto the streets.

But the Atlanta area, as frustrated experts pointed out, is a patchwork of regional governments that often don’t get along with each other.

It also has a deeply ingrained car culture and a mass transit system that serves only a fraction of the metro area’s 5.5 million people. In 2012 voters across the region defeated a one-penny sales tax that would have strengthened regional transit.

After a snowstorm hobbled Atlanta in 2011, Reed, the Atlanta mayor, wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he had learned an important lesson about collaboration and cooperation.

“We will work faster and smarter to deliver the kind of response that our residents demand and deserve,” he wrote.

Asked on “Morning Joe” why authorities had not worked better together this time, he said: “I think that we all have responsibility.”

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This story was originally published on Thu Jan 30, 2014 2:46 PM EST