It Seems Everyone is Still Pissed About the Snow!
No doubt you’ve already seen the vid above, and it’s likely you’ve experienced in real life the hassles and, perhaps, destruction the blizzard caused. So the questions coming out of local blogs as well as the papers are: 1. Is this a case of straight-up class warfare, wherein Manhattan has been favored in terms of…
No doubt you’ve already seen the vid above, and it’s likely you’ve experienced in real life the hassles and, perhaps, destruction the blizzard caused. So the questions coming out of local blogs as well as the papers are: 1. Is this a case of straight-up class warfare, wherein Manhattan has been favored in terms of snow removal at the expense of outer boroughs such as Brooklyn? 2. Even if that’s true, isn’t that more or less business as usual? 3. At the most extreme end of the spectrum, can deaths be attributed to the fact that the city appears to have been unprepared for the blizzard? 4. And, finally, does Mayor Bloomberg deserve the bulk of the blame if one considers the city’s response lacking? Several City Councilpeople are definitely jumping on this bandwagon.
As someone posted elsewhere, if Mayor Bloomberg could shovel snow as well as he shovels bullshit, our streets would have been totally clear already. The man has no shame whatsoever. The city’s response this time has been piss poor, not simply “not up to what we should expect” (or words to that effect). It should make NYer’s wonder about ALL of the bullshit (school improvements, police stats, City Time) that city hall professes to have made. Emperor WIndbag should face a recall vote.
By the way, I don’t give the head of the MTA much credit either for their performance. Perhaps if the MTA had not agreed to give Ratner the bargain of the century for the Atlantic Yards, the MTA would have had more money to spend on keeping trains running, expecially here in Brooklyn where several lines are still out.
Sure, this snowstorm was awful, but this is the worst performance i have seen in my 40 years of living in Crown Hts. And the most obnoxious mayor to boot.
No cablevision, hunh? You call 911 yet?
The Mayor failed us here in Bensonhurst. Streets just got plowed as of now, it is 8 pm.
we also had no cabelvision since Sunday night.
Bloomberg is just getting Times Square all cleaned up for the New Year.
he is an idiot.
oh, stroll around Manhattan, see a Braodway show….
is he fucking kidding, fuck the play, plow the street, dummie
There is no money.
City/Counties/State coffers are dry.
DSNY did is doing as good a job as they can with limited human resources.
Just be thankful the redlining hasn’t started…. yet.
There were no cannibalism events.
It’s all good.
Did anyone see how furious this storm was? This storm was much worse than February’s storm. I think that Sanitation was just so overwhelmed by how fast it came, and how it accumulated in a small amount of time. It was coming down at a rate of 3 inches per hour. I had four to five foot drifts on my corner. The entire front of my house was covered with a huge snow drift which covered the entire stoop and half of front door. I have never seen a storm like this before-it’s even worse than the storm we had in 1996 on Martin Luther King Day. The reporting on the storm was horrendous. Friday morning- 1010 WINS was reporting that the storm was going out to sea. On Friday night, Lee Goldberg was predicting 6-12 inches. On Saturday morning, 1010 wins was predicting 4-8 inches. As the day went by, and into Sunday, I still heard predictions of 12 inches of snow. As Sunday night went by I started to hear 2-3 feet of snow. They probably planned for a storm of 10-12 inches of snow, and were overwhelmed when it turned out to be much worse. With abandoned cars all over the place, the plows had trouble clearing the streets. There is just so much snow, and so many streets, it is taking a while to clean it up. The headcount reduction probably didn’t help matters. If you have 2000 plows, but are down 400 workers, you can only drive 1600 plows.
“Give reason its due, I shoveled 4 or 5 times on Sunday but the final time – around 10:30 – the wind was causing drifts so quickly that digging was obliterated in 5 minutes – even a foot deep channel from front door to pavement disappeared. The storm last Feb. was much easier to stay ahead of.
So plows that night would’ve been futile. It was the Monday morning aftermath that was slow.”
^^^This
I heard plows on Franklin most of Sunday night. After a while there was silence. I went out briefly to grab something from the bodega and I saw why. Plows had stopped on Franklin, but was still on EPW. The plows and trucks were going by and as soon as they passed the road was covered again. It looked like they moved absolutely nothing.
Great quote in comment thread on NYT story on snow removal:
Guess the sanitation dept. wasn’t “too big to fail†like the banks. This is what a post-union corporatist plutocracy looks like.
-Gerald
Midwood II is now plowed. While walking home from another productive morning @
K-Dog about 1/2 hour ago I saw Midwood I being plowed. It was a very impressive
operation consisting of a truck with a giant V-shaped blade, a regular snow
plow, and another truck with a conventional snow plow blade. Hurray!! On top of
that, my car, on the north side of Midwood II, happened to be next to a low spot
in the wall of snow thrown up by the plow and I could actually get it out with
NO digging 🙂 –of course I put it right back; I’m not desperate; or crazy.
Oh, also the bus at Bedford and Rutland has finally been removed. On top of
that, I was able to buy a NY Times and K-Dog once again has bagels. Life is
good! 🙂
“It makes sense to use large heavy garbage trucks as snowplows, and then they have the salt spreaders come by afterwards.” This actually makes little sense when these trucks don’t pick up trash while they are plowing, which they don’t. The trash is now piling up. Put plows on the salt spreaders, not the garbage trucks. Also, like every other snow-prone city in the country, get every street sprayed before the storm starts.