The winter storm caused major impacts and severe travel issues in the states of Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi as many people were caught outside unexpectedly in the hazardous conditions, which included snow, freezing rain and sleet.

The breakdown of the normal polar vortex around the North Pole allowed an outbreak of frigid Arctic air to penetrate well into the South.

On January 31, the weakened winter storm was absorbed into the circulation of another more powerful extratropical cyclone over the North Atlantic, while situated off the coast of South Carolina.

Bridges to barrier islands were also closed due to ice, and the almost total lack of deicing equipment and chemicals both for the Florida DOT and for local governments in all affected states, which had to rely entirely on sand spreaders retrofitted to dump trucks.

On the Atlantic coast, Jacksonville was completely spared, and in coastal Georgia the ice storm warning was lowered, leaving Savannah with only some sleet.

On January 27, warnings were issued for the south metro area, while the central region (from east to west) was placed under a winter weather advisory.

A source of some of the confusion was a tweet issued by the NWSFO in Peachtree City at 3:08 pm and repeated on the local news that read: "Winter precip will make travel risky across GA midday Tues into Weds.

Gwinnett schools failed to release students early at all, and was spared only by the fact that the snow and dropping temperatures arrived slightly later on the northeast side of the metro.

Buses became stuck not only due to slick roads, but even more so because traffic in metro Atlanta (except the east and southeast) quickly ground to a halt between noon and 1pm, as shown on TV by traffic-speed maps from GDOT's Georgia Navigator system.

(One unit included Clark Howard, a GNG reservist who is well known as a consumer reporter for WSB-TV 2 and nationally for a daily radio show based at WSB AM 750.)

At one point, a continuous string of winter storm warnings was draped across at least eight states from Texas to the Carolinas, a distance of over 1,000 miles (1,600 km).

With more than a dozen counties, each with multiple cities, very little intergovernmental cooperation occurs due to local politics, and there is no metropolitan government except for a weak planning agency.