Summer storms are no surprise occurrence these days, and they undoubtedly dampen and slow the commute. But one such storm did more damage to the ride in Cobb County last Tuesday than it should have.

Storms started popping like popcorn on July 21 all over Metro Atlanta and North Georgia. Most areas got some kind of rain, but the random showers varied in intensity. And since they weren’t driven by a front, they moved slowly. This meant the stronger ones caused flooding and wind damage as they pummeled the same spots for protracted times. This was the case on the south end of Marietta in the I-75/I-285/Cumberland region.

A storm dumped an incredible amount of rain just before 5 p.m. and slowed the ride, which wasn’t surprising. Then we got calls from our Traffic Troopers to our WSB 24-Hour Traffic Center about flooding in the I-75 Express Lanes. While we searched for that, we found something far more damning and that we have seen far too often on the Atlanta interstates.

A large, deep pool of water collected in four left lanes of I-75/southbound at Windy Hill Road (Exit 260) and we found it on the WSB Jam Cam. At least one vehicle found itself stuck in the water.

While traffic tried to squeeze past this in only an unflooded right lane or two, we noticed the adjacent northbound-facing Peach Pass Lanes coming to a stop. We searched and found flooding blocking both of those lanes just north of the Windy Hill area.

This kind of flooding seems to happen too often on Atlanta freeways in torrential rain. Of course, extreme pressure from Mother Nature causes problems around which officials cannot always plan. But interstate flooding seems to happen for a consistent reason: blocked or obstructed drains.

Blocked drains are big problems in autumn, when shed leaves work their way into the roads’ drainage outlets. Dealing with that just requires the constant maintenance of clearing them, and staying ahead of that is hard, considering everything else HERO operators and road crews are responsible for.

But other things block drains, including a negligent work crew in the I-285/Ashford Dunwoody area twice back in January. They had mistakenly left items needed in the Transform I-285/GA-400 project obstructing a drain. The company got a warning but mistakenly did it again, causing a similar scenario on the I-285/westbound (Outer Loop) that I-75/southbound recently saw. Cars got stuck. Traffic jammed for miles. And the chaos was avoidable.

The I-75 flooding was slightly more random. Sources who worked the scene say that dirt blocking the drains is what caused the water to pool. But there is still some blame for multiple sides to take.

First, GDOT should be regularly cleaning these drains, especially in a stormy season where these occurrences are more likely. The fact that that much dirt accumulated in such a vital place is a sign the drains are not getting enough maintenance. So the state’s being more proactive in that department is a start to alleviating the problem.

The motorists deserve blame two-fold in this scenario. First, a few unwisely tried to drive in the deepest part of the water on I-75/southbound. Hence, they got stuck. The first that did it got stuck for almost 30 minutes and was in full view of dozens of vehicles. But when the wrecker removed it, several others tried to “Jesus and Peter” their way through. A few more predictably also stalled in the ephemeral lake.

This process got even more complicated because the police and HEROs took an incredibly long time to arrive and both block off the scene and unclog the drain. But this delay wasn’t their fault. The backup was so intense that motorists selfishly and unwisely drove on the shoulders, allowing no outlet through which the first responders could arrive. So a tremendous downpour caused a traffic jam that trapped many drivers. Then some of the said drivers shot themselves and others in the right feet by blocking the people trying to alleviate the jam.

So both GDOT and those stuck in traffic could have done more to have avoided this brief disaster. And for anyone who got stuck in that backup far after it started, that was also avoidable. We put this on 95.5 WSB every six minutes in our normal barrage of reports and sent out push alerts and automatic audio alerts in our Triple Team Traffic Alerts App. If you’re not plugged into those, you’re missing on the most immediate way to find out about and avoid the inevitable Metro Atlanta traffic blunders like these.

Cox Media Group