An ARTCC controller worked a period of traffic of extreme complexity due to numerous weather deviati...

Narrative:

A line [of] weather started to build. Because of this; all aircraft traversing the airspace deviated north of a fix; then slowly turned back to the southwest. The volume of traffic was exceedingly high. The concentration of aircraft was such that it was all but impossible to keep data blocks from overlapping and obscuring one another; thereby making traffic searches very difficult. Due to the weather and bad rides frequency congestion was very bad. This extremely high volume of concentrated traffic affected [numerous] ARTCC sectors.the supervisor was well aware of what was going on. He asked traffic management unit (tmu) to reroute traffic but was told there was nothing they could do. He had the operations manager come down to see the situation and get tmu to do something. The event lasted about an hour. In my almost 30 years controlling this is one of a the worst situations I have seen.tmu needs to more proactive and responsive to developing situations. They don't seem to take these lapses in their performance seriously. They are quick to come down and complain to our supervisors when we come up a couple miles short in a spacing situation; yet it seems; no one holds them accountable when these type of situations happen.

Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: An ARTCC Controller worked a period of traffic of extreme complexity due to numerous weather deviations and too many aircraft routed through their airspace.

Narrative: A line [of] weather started to build. Because of this; all aircraft traversing the airspace deviated north of a fix; then slowly turned back to the southwest. The volume of traffic was exceedingly high. The concentration of aircraft was such that it was all but impossible to keep data blocks from overlapping and obscuring one another; thereby making traffic searches very difficult. Due to the weather and bad rides frequency congestion was very bad. This extremely high volume of concentrated traffic affected [numerous] ARTCC sectors.The supervisor was well aware of what was going on. He asked Traffic Management Unit (TMU) to reroute traffic but was told there was nothing they could do. He had the Operations Manager come down to see the situation and get TMU to do something. The event lasted about an hour. In my almost 30 years controlling this is one of a the worst situations I have seen.TMU needs to more proactive and responsive to developing situations. They don't seem to take these lapses in their performance seriously. They are quick to come down and complain to our supervisors when we come up a couple miles short in a spacing situation; yet it seems; no one holds them accountable when these type of situations happen.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.

Attributes
ACN	1351005
Time
Date	201604
Local Time Of Day	0001-0600
Place
Locale Reference	ZZZ.ARTCC
State Reference	US
Environment
Flight Conditions	Marginal
Aircraft 1
Make Model Name	No Aircraft
Person 1
Function	Enroute
Qualification	Air Traffic Control Fully Certified
Experience	Air Traffic Control Time Certified In Pos 1 (yrs) 14
Events
Anomaly	ATC Issue All Types Deviation - Procedural Published Material / Policy Inflight Event / Encounter Weather / Turbulence

An ARTCC controller worked a period of traffic of extreme complexity due to numerous weather deviations and too many aircraft routed through their airspace.