'The buck stops with me': Georgia gov takes responsibility for snowstorm response

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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