It is as much a part of a New York City blizzard as slush and cold and the color white itself: postblizzard outrage over the municipal response to said blizzard. One can imagine the very earliest settlers of New Amsterdam railed at their Dutch leaders after blizzards. The path to my farm is not plowed! It’s been three days! Het sneeuwt!
In January 2001, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani criticized the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for not coordinating with the city to keep the airports running after a blizzard.
The Outrage That Followed the blizzard this week is no exception, and actually suggests that the level of outrage is an accurate barometer of the severity of the storm. This was a big one, and so the outrage is pouring forth on the streets of the city — like the salt that should have been more widely used if someone upstairs was doing his job, thinketh the outraged citizen.
To be clear, the sentiment does not appear to be without merit. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did himself no favors on Monday by calling the blizzard “inconvenient” and adding that “our city is doing exactly what you’d want it to do.”
Criticism of the city’s response to what has been called its sixth-largest storm has been widespread and top-to-bottom, from the man on the street to Christine M. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who announced hearings regarding the cleanup, which she called “unacceptable.”
But is there a point when the outrage itself become outrageous? After all, it was an awful lot of snow. Or is outrage something every New Yorker needs to experience to pull through? Can we all learn to stop complaining and love the plows?
“I think New Yorkers, obviously, are a difficult crew; I’m one of them,” said Steven M. Polan, a lawyer and former sanitation commissioner. “Generally people can tolerate difficulty and disruption pretty well. But the public will pounce when they feel government officials do not seem to be in touch with the misery.”
With her outraged criticisms, Ms. Quinn joined a venerable list of previously “outraged at weather response” officials, not a few of whom have found it a tactic for political gain.
In 1969, Mayor John V. Lindsay was skewered after a blizzard buried the city in 15 inches of snow. Streets in Queens remained covered for days. “Homeowners greeted the visiting mayor with boos, jeers and curses,” according to Mayor Lindsay’s obituary in 2000.
In 1996, Howard Golden, the Brooklyn borough president, accused the Sanitation Department of ignoring his constituents. “Major streets have not been adequately plowed,” he said. “The impact is more severe in Brooklyn than anywhere else in the city.”
In 2000, a Dec. 30 blizzard inspired hardly any outrage, perhaps because of its arrival over a holiday weekend. So Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani ginned up some outrage of his own, criticizing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for not coordinating with the city to keep the airports running.
The day after the storm, following a helicopter tour of the city, Mr. Giuliani said: “We noticed one area that looked something like the North Pole, like nobody had really plowed it effectively. You wonder where that area was? Kennedy Airport.”
The next year, predictions of a blizzard in March 2001 fell far short, and the outrage quickly turned on meteorologists. “They never get it right!” a woman in a Queens hair salon complained to a reporter.
A quieter, more patient and rural folk may remind us that snow is snow, and lots of it at once, on a cold and windy night, can be disruptive, and that human beings are flawed creatures who do not predict these sorts of things properly. And the New Yorker would reply: Disrupt this, bozo.
Does the outrage seem to ever do any good? Would that it could melt snow. The city has tweaked its snow-removal plan here and there after postblizzard complaints, only to be stymied again by the next storm, as was the case this powdery, windy week.
Mr. Polan, the sanitation commissioner from 1990 to 1992, was spared a blizzard during his tenure. “I was fortunate,” he said. The reality is, to plow every street quickly enough to avoid outrage is unfeasible, he said.
“It’s absurd to suggest that we should maintain manning levels in the Department of Sanitation to be able to respond optimally to something that happens every 10 years,” he said. “It’s awfully expensive.”
Other cities accustomed to harsh snowstorms appear more accustomed to waiting days for plows. In Lincoln, Neb., the plows visit neighborhood streets only after emergency roads, arterial roads and bus routes have been cleared and more than four inches of snow has fallen, according to the city’s snow removal plan on its Web site. The City of Detroit spells out its three-phase snow removal strategy, but is careful not to make any promises as to how quickly all streets are plowed.
Buffalo, which seems to be partly made of snow, is often held up as a snow-removal model — except when it is not, as was the case after a heavy storm in the South Buffalo neighborhood earlier this month. “We need a flippin’ dig-out,” one resident complained, among many who said they did not see a plow for more than 24 hours in a relatively small neighborhood.
In New York, the outrage comes quicker. Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for Straphangers Campaign, said postblizzard complaints were a product of big-city expectations.
“New Yorkers have a healthy sense of being aggrieved to begin with,” he said. “We’ve come to expect decent levels of services.”
But he attributed this week’s outrage in part to the mayor’s ear, which his critics have said seems to be cast out of something from the periodic table of the elements.
“He’s not choked up with emotion about the problems people are experiencing,” he said. “Telling everyone that we live in the best of all possible cities for snow removal doesn’t cut it.”
Credit : The New York Times
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