Al Roker, longtime NBC Today show personality and “Weatherman-in Chief” didn’t hold back this morning while appearing on The Weather Channel (also a part of the NBC family). Roker placed the blame for the thousands of stranded motorists, school students, and pedestrians squarely on the shoulders of Governor Nathan Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.
“The mayor and the governor got on TV yesterday and said this was not expected . . . . it’s not true…we were talking about this Monday . . . . They took the gamble . . . . I don’t think they wanted to spend the money . . . . this was poor planning on the mayor’s part and the governor’s part . . . . ”
By midday Dalton Mayor David Pennington, one of Deal’s two GOP opponents in the May primary, had issued a press release comparing his early salting of roads in Dalton to Deal’s allegedly poor response in metro-Atlanta.
In a press conference held late this morning, Governor Deal attempted to explain his comments of late Tuesday night in which he suggested that weather reports prior to the storm hitting had suggested that the brunt of the storm would strike far south of Atlanta.
In this case everyone might be a bit right. InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery: “This has come down to a battle between politicians and meteorologists. Governor Deal is arguing that local forecasters at the TV stations were more accurate than the National Weather Service. But the NWS issued it’s a “Winter Storm Warning” long before daybreak. The fact is it looks as if everyone ranging from private employers all the way to government leaders need to start treating winter storm warnings just as seriously as they take tornado warnings.”
Political reporters at the Governor Deal’s press conference seized on a statement by GEMA’s Charlie English who suggested that an emergency did not appear to exist between 3:30pm-to-4:00 pm, leading to an immediate repudiation of English’s statement by Governor Deal in English’s presence.
The press obviously smells political blood…stay tuned to InsiderAdvantage and James Online.
