DECATUR, Ga. (AP) – Temperatures fell to 10 degrees before dawn in Marietta, Cartersville and Rome and 12 in Atlanta as an arctic blast of frigid weather brought the coldest temperatures in a year to Georgia.
It was even colder in the north Georgia mountains. A U.S. Forest Service weather station recorded an air temperature of 0 degrees shortly after 5 a.m. Thursday at Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest peak.
School districts were delaying start times and warming shelters were open across the state.
In downtown Decatur, just east of Atlanta, deliveryman Travis Daniel was carting food into a Subway restaurant. While the cold was biting outside, it was still warmer than the zero-degree cooler on his truck. Still, Daniel said he would not trade his outdoor job for indoor work.
“Out here, I’m unsupervised,” said Daniel, 45. “I’d go crazy” working indoors.
A few blocks away, city employee Tony Parker, 50, was emptying a parking meter near the downtown square. He was wearing three shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, gloves, hand warmers and a heavy coat to ward off the cold during his eight-hour shift.
City officials were letting Parker and his colleagues warm up during indoor breaks. Forecasters expected temperatures to rise to just below freezing later Thursday.
“I think that once the sun comes up we’ll be a little better,” Parker said. “But brother, at 6:30 this morning, it was brutal.”
A wind chill advisory Thursday morning included all of northern and central Georgia and parts of south Georgia, including Vidalia, Americus and Statesboro.
The wind chill – the combination of air temperature and wind – was 4 degrees below zero before dawn Thursday in the northwest Georgia town of Calhoun.