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How Did The Blizzard Go Wrong? Let Bloomberg Count The Ways
By
Jaya Saxena
Published Jan 10, 2011
Modified Jan 10, 2011
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By
Jaya Saxena
Published Jan 10, 2011
Modified Jan 10, 2011
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The City Council is continuing to grill city officials about just what happened during the Blizzageddon catastrophe, and they're actually getting a few apologies! Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph Bruno said, "I should have moved more quickly," and Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith admitted, "We owe you and all New Yorkers for that lack of performance our administration's apology and my personal promise not to let it happen again." Now, Mayor Bloomberg has released a full report on just what happened, and his action plan for the future.
In the review [pdf], Bloomberg cites the decision not to declare a snow emergency and insufficient accountability tools as problems with the city's response. He writes, "plowing progress is tracked based on routes, so it is difficult to know the status of a particular City street at any given time." However, the city is not completely to blame. People should be angry at meteorologists, who "predicted low accumulations up until 18 hours prior to the storm." That gave them just 17 scant hours to get motivated enough to call an emergency meeting one hour before the storm.
Bloomberg's 15-point action plan calls for the city to first "establish a more formal process for considering emergency declarations" and "provide a broader range of options that could be part of an emergency declaration and make them clear and understandable to New Yorkers." Because according to Goldsmith, the protocol to declare an emergency "never arrived at my doorstep, or the mayor's doorstep." Bloomberg also lists off arming Sanitation trucks with better communication devices, improving tow truck deployment and making it easier to hire additional laborers, but let's face it, none of this is going to get done by the time tomorrow's snow starts falling. So everybody just make sure your Chinese delivery place can still make it to your house and position your video cameras at your windows—we wouldn't want to miss another YouTube sensation.
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blizzard 2010
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