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Bloomberg Blames Blizzard Response On Info Flow
By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 6, 2011
Modified Jan 6, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 6, 2011
Modified Jan 6, 2011
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Mayor Bloomberg spoke to reporters today about the city's snow preparations for this weekend's predicted snowfall. Desperate to prove that the city won't screw up a non-blizzard snow event, he promised, “We plan to do a great job, the kind of job the public has come to expect us to do.” But just in case he's making a few changes. Like the city will be sending out "Street Condition Observation Unit Teams" (SCOUTs, get it?) to look for problem areas and adding GPS to to 50 Sanitation trucks in Brooklyn. Also, a few Department of Sanitation chiefs were demoted.
Didn't think that the FDNY's Chief of Emergency Medical Services Command John Peruggia would be the only person to be demoted after the Boxing Day Blizzard? He wasn't. While they are going and adding those GPS units to "better communicate" with the city, the Department of Sanitation today went and demoted two Brooklyn bosses, Brooklyn South Assistant Chief Joseph Montgomery and Brooklyn South Deputy Chief Joseph Susol, after "examining" their performance in the storm. "Structural and personnel changes were in order in Brooklyn to create a more balanced operation," explained DoS Commissioner John Doherty.
Meanwhile, asked about the city's lackluster response to our last snowfall Hizzoner said that the problem wasn't so much that they weren't aware of the issues, but that they didn't have the organization in place to deal with it: “I don’t think the information was collected and distributed and sorted so that it was anywheres near as useful as it could have been,” he said while dodging questions as to why Joseph Bruno, the Commissioner of Emergency Management, was not on hand at the conference, "Joe Bruno is sitting now over at the office of Emergency management getting briefed ... doing what he's supposed to do."
On the plus side for straphangers: snow or no tomorrow, all of this weekend's scheduled MTA work has been canceled.
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blizzard 2010
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