Like most such windows of opportunity, the one for looking at NYC's response to the snowstorm may prove VERY small

by Ken

Although inevitably I'm going to wind up talking mostly about our recent snowstorm and the response (or lack of it) to it, the question I really want to raise is: Will there ever come a time when it will be appropriate to talk about New York City's response to the storm in the view of our Mayor Mike? Our mayor, as I'm sure you know, is the man who seems to be spending substantial quantities of money (well, not for him; for him it's probably pocket change) to find out whether a country fed up with the two major parties might wish to anoint him as a "no label" presidential pretender.

Because, you see, the mayor's standard response this week to questions about the city's response to the storm has been: (1) We're doing the best we can; and (2) now isn't the time to talk about that, it's the time to close ranks and get on with the job of cleaning up those 20 inches of snow. I'm just wondering, though, whether there's actually ever going to be a time to talk about it.

I guess I'm still thinking about the time when it was considered okay to talk about impeaching Chimpy George the Prez. Although his entire administration seemed to be singlemindedly devoted to racking up impeachment-worthy offenses, and although the prospects for impeachment while the House was controlled by Republicans impervious to the rule of law or the sway of the Constitution, when Democrats retook control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, you'll recall that almost immediately new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that impeachment was "off the table." And then, as more and more of those sorry Chimpified chickens came home to roost, and the dimension of the catastrophe of the Bush regime became hard to miss (and I'm talking long before the coup de grace of the economic meltdown), it turned out that it was too late for impeachment. Somehow the time for impeachment had passed, without any notice of the event. Apparently there had been a window of opportunity for it, but it had closed before anybody knew it was open. Maybe that too was scheduled overnight on a weekend, and we missed it.

I can't help feeling that once the beleaguered NYC Sanitation Department has had more time, in combination with the eventual warming that's expected later in the week, and the crisis portion of the storm aftermath has passed, and it's theoretically possible to talk about the city's response, according to Mayor Mike's timetable, it's going to turn out to be equally inappropriate to talk about. We're going to be told how there's no point in looking back, we need to be looking forward in our efforts at improved storm-readiness -- you know, in the way that President Obama told us so forcefully that we should be looking back at bad things that might have happened but should only be looking forward to doing things right.

In other words, I'm thinking it's going to turn out that whenever the window for talking about it was open, it has already closed.

NOW, SPEAKING ABOUT THAT SNOWSTORM
RESPONSE (SORRY, MAYOR MIKE)

This snowy Brooklyn streetscape accompanies George Packer's New Yorker blogpost "Snow Story" (see below).

Since the arrival of the Big Storm on Sunday, my TV has been tuned, first nonstop and later semiregularly, to our local cable-news channel, NY1, where a recurring feature has been angry New Yorkers, generally angry New Yorkers from the "outer boroughs" of Brooklyn and Queens, complain about the city's weak response to the heavy snowfall. My guess is that Bronx residents have even more grounds for grievance, but among the "outer" boroughs no borough -- not even remote, underpopulated, self-contained Staten Island -- is outerer than the Bronx, which hardly exists in the media consciousness except for occasional crime or corruption stories.

Now, outer-borough grievances about poor snow-clearance efforts are hardly new. I'm guessing that the late John Lindsay went to his grave still hearing the outcry that arose during his mayoralty. Still, our Mayor Mike has made a point of pretending to be an all-boroughs mayor -- a theme that surfaced endlessly during all the endless telephone polls he bankrolled during his last reelection campaign. It struck me as bogus then, and I wonder how outer-borough voters who voted for the son of a bitch are feeling about it this week.

To be sure, a 20-inch snowstorm isn't something the city can be expected to expect to happen at any time, and that much snow presents a substantially larger problem than even a heavy, but still ligher, snowstorm: With that much snow, there's no place really to put removed snow, at least not without creating a navigability problem more or less equivalent (albeit likely pedestrian-based) to the one you just "solved." Nevertheless, the fact is, it can happen at any time, and clearly the city wasn't in any way, shape, or form prepared for this one, even though it was fairly well forecast. Certainly part of the problem is that it was a Sunday storm, and the city never seems to go all-out in snow-cleaning efforts on the weekend, I imagine because of overtime costs, coupled with the belief that the city doesn't have to function at full capacity on weekends -- the "thinking," to the extent that it can be called thinking, being that it's entirely possible that by Monday morning temperatures may have risen into the 60s or 70s and melted all the snow. It also didn't help that, substantial as the Sunday snowfall was, the really crippling part of the storm came overnight, and the city also isn't really great at dealing with overnight storms, again (I'm guessing) because it involves a lot of overtime and after all the city doesn't have to be at full capacity during the overnight period either.

Of course, put that all together -- 20 inches of snow from an overnight Sunday-to-Monday storm -- and the likely result is that the digging-out efforts don't really get into full swing until Monday morning. In addition, because the city Sanitation Department is a shrunken shell of its former self, because that's what they city thinks it can get away with paying for, at maximum effort its efforts aren't all that maximal. Today I saw the sanitation commissioner being asked about reports that residents were seeing snow-clearing equipment all over the city sitting idle, and while his response wasn't entirely clear to me, he seemed to be acknowledging that yes, we now actually have more equipment than available personnel to operate it.

I was rummaging around on the New Yorker website looking for a link for another post when I stumbled across this blogpost by staff writer George Packer, called "Snow Story." Packer, it turns out, is a Brooklynite, and one of those who found his neighborhood substantially untouched by New York City's early snow-clearing efforts. His "snow story" begins:

The trouble began Sunday night. Just as the storm was blowing at its wildest, I trudged out to buy milk and found two women trying to maneuver a helpless old-model compact off our Brooklyn street, two-thirds of the way down the block. Stuck at an angle near a buried fire hydrant, they were pushing and spinning and getting nowhere, with the smell of burning rubber noxiously sharp in the cold air. "Do you need some help?" No one ever answers right away, "Yes, thank you." They're too caught in the immediate distraction of their trap, too angry or embarrassed or wary. The women, black and in their thirties, considered the offer of a stranger emerging out of the blizzard. I explained that we could move the car fifty or sixty feet up the street, following the tracks of another car that was stuck farther up. "And how is that going to be helpful?" one of them demanded. My idea was to guide the car into a row of free parking spaces ahead of mine, but she was right: the tracks were disappearing in the snow even as we stood talking, and though we got the car out of its rut, we couldn't advance more than five feet.

By Monday,

the ledge of snow in the doorway was above the knee: no way to leave the house except by digging from inside out. Up and down the block, cars were buried in drifts. Someone had carved a canyon from the sidewalk to a driver's side door through a roof-high snow pile that was partly composed of shovelings. In the economy of a storm this big, there was nowhere to get rid of snow that didn't encroach on someone else's space, and some shovelfuls must have been tossed back and forth a few times. All day we waited for the plows, but they didn't come.

The frustration and helplessness mount.

Twenty inches of snow isn't a 7.5 earthquake or Category 4 hurricane. Unless it's life-threatening, an emergency rarely lifts human beings above themselves. A snowstorm like this is bad enough to make people parochial and aggrieved, but not disastrous enough to make them generous and heroic. The stories of people trapped on subway trains all night, of hundreds of 911 calls going unanswered for hours, remained abstract, because we were in no actual danger. And so, instead, it seemed as if our block was being singled out for idiocy and neglect.

A moving van, with a crew of three Spanish-speakers moving a couple to an apartment on the next block, became the latest and largest obstacle to movement on the block. Eventually, though, the moving crew works wonders.

When I came out, a little after noon, the movers had finished loading and had actually managed to advance their van ten or fifteen feet. They were doing it by shoveling the entire street in front of them -- two or three of them furiously working the snow, without gloves, then laying the blankets they use to protect furniture in front of the van's tires and creeping forward. Stage by stage, they were getting close to the intersection. I walked around the neighborhood to see if there were any passable streets and found an exit route that a four-wheel-drive vehicle might clear to a major avenue. By the time I returned, the van was past the intersection, part way up the next block, and the movers were already unloading it. They had plowed our street with shovels. Outsiders on the clock, they had done the city's work -- our work.

Will you let us know when we can talk about it, Mayor Mike? I didn't think so.


UPDATE: MAYOR MIKE BITES THE BULLET

Late this afternoon the NYT's Patrick McGeehan reports:

Bloomberg Takes Blame for Response to Snowstorm

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg accepted responsibility Wednesday for the city’s response to a crippling snowstorm, pledging to have every street plowed by morning and then to figure out why his administration’s cleanup efforts were inadequate.

Speaking at a hardware store in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, Mr. Bloomberg said he was “extremely dissatisfied” with the performance of the city’s emergency management system. He said the response was “a lot worse” than after other recent snowstorms and was not as efficient as “the city has a right to expect.”

But he also defended his commissioners, including John J. Doherty, who runs the Sanitation Department. The mayor called him “the best sanitation commissioner this city has ever had, period, bar none.” . . .

You can be sure the name "John Lindsay" has been heard in conversations among hizzoner's inner circle. Still, it's well to watch closely for the time that that window of opportunity for discussion remains ever so slightly open.


MORE TEAM SNOWSTORM COVERAGE

In our next post Noah will reflect on how the city reached this level of, er, "preparedness."

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