thousands of flights were canceled tuesday. the hardest hit airport, atlanta s hart field jackson international airport. right now we are seeing sleet falling here in charleston. we ve seen primarily rain up until this point. you can see the ice pellets bouncing off the top of this bin. you can also see over here, i want to show you ice accumulating on the signs. ice like this has caused several power outages. several hundred people without power right now in this area. they are working to restore services. all right. thank you very much for that. as we well know, it is incredible how this storm is crippling parts of the south this morning. some children were stuck in classrooms and gyms. let s bring in the director of emergency management in atlanta
i ve sent several tweets and e-mails. finally i got a response on the phone from a is spokesperson from atlanta public schools. the response was, i ll have to get back to you own that. well, that s been the question for 18 hours. however, if you check the atlanta public schools twitter account, they are starting to send out messages and congratulations and pats on the back for the work they have done. but they still have not found a way to get the students back to their parents. hundreds in atlanta waiting to get home. and hundreds in neighboring districts who also decided to open schools and hold classes on a day when there was obviously advance warning that this was going to be a significant event tour the atlanta and metro area, kate. a lot of who deserve kudos school teachers and principals and bus drivers trying to keep them safe. let s get to indra petersons for the latest. where do things stand? this is not over indra? this is not where the huge
you re not satisfied. and we understand that. we want to make sure that all the children are taken care of. the description of what carol gave happened in atlanta is identical to what happened in birmingh birmingham, but there s one difference. we were not in the predictive model. if anything, we would get a light dusting. that was in total error. so by the time we saw what was happening, it was too late. all of the businesses and schools began to let out. it clogged up our interstate system which then led to a clogging of the side roads and many people became stranded. we have had to scurry to try to play catch up and all of our people working in the public works department, our public safety units within the fire and the police department, they ve all been out overnight to try to
see it looks like a pileup right there. these cars aren t going anywhere fast. not what people in ga fa and definitely not emergency management officials want to be seeing as the sun comes up this morning. this is going to be a very tough day for everyone in the south. let s get back to carol costello. i don t know if you had a monitor out there, but this is a big problem today. reporter: how do you spell nightmare? atlanta. looking at that picture, they re probably saying to themselves, there s really not that much snow on the ground. a lot of people are wondering why it paralyzed the entire city and outlyi suburbs. let me explain. the snow began falling around
this should be 8:00 in the morning should be kind of the middle of morning commute in georgia. folks completely deserted on this highway. another sight we saw, pileup after pileup, cars abandoned on the same highway. different location. take a look at this video from earlier. that last evening commute still stuck this morning. it s been a horrible ordeal for hundreds of parents. until this morning, many of their children were stranded on school bus us all night long. other kids were forced to spend all day and night in their schools. the snow and ice triggering the state of emergency in virginia and the carolinas where they could see up to 10 inches of snow or more by the time this system clears out. cnn is the only place to be when extreme weather strikes. this is one of those situations. we begin our coverage in hard-hit atlanta with carol costello. the more we see the aerial image as, carol, the more i m worried about what s going to happen