Chicago: the city that works.
Unlike New York City, which became infamous for destroying its own vehicles during its blizzard, city officials set up this website to let owners know where they could find their towed cars and trucks. The city will even provide enough free fuel to get off the lot if the vehicles ran low while trapped.
For those who have to deal with snow as an annual thing or in (our case a daily thing) this time of year, the Snowdozer can help aide in a very tedious task of scraping snow, ice and other stuff off your car windows and windshield. For the reasonable price of $17, the Snowdozer will scrape the crap both forward and backward thanks to a double-blade design. It’s front handle reduces strain and its extendable, telescoping arm allows for easily reaching far across the windshield of larger cars.
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NEW YORK (NewYork) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared a weather emergency Wednesday since significant snowfall has been forecast for the evening rush hour, through tomorrow’s morning rush hour.
1. The public is urged to avoid all unnecessary driving for the duration of the storm and until further directed, and to use public transportation wherever possible. If you must drive, use extreme caution. Information about any service changes to public transportation is available on the MTA website at http://www.mta.info/.
2. Any vehicle found to be blocking roadways or impeding the ability to plow streets shall be subject to towing at the owner’s expense.
3. Effective immediately, alternate side parking, payment at parking meters and garbage collections are suspended citywide until further notice.
4. The Emergency Management, Fire, Police, Sanitation, and Transportation Commissioners will be taking all appropriate and necessary steps to preserve public safety and to render all required and available assistance to protect the security, well-being and health of the residents of the City.
The snow is sooo yesterday.
The city resumed limited garbage collection on Monday for the first time following the post-Christmas blizzard, but some elected officials and residents have already begun complaining that Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration has allowed too much refuse to pile up.
On streets throughout the city, the mounds of snow have been replaced with mounds of garbage, creating a new highly visible eyesore for the mayor.
"Today we started an aggressive approach to try to clean up the waste that has built up over the last week due to the snow storm," said John Doherty, commissioner of the Department of Sanitation, at a news conference in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan.
"During the course of the week, as we make our rounds, some people will get two pick-ups where they normally receive three, and some other people may get either one or two pick-ups where they receive twice-a-week collection," he said.
Mr. Doherty said he hopes the city will be "pretty well normal" on garbage collection by week's end, and he noted that a week is the longest the city has ever gone without collecting garbage. The city won't resume recycling collection until the weekend, at the earliest, he said.
"We ask the public to please get their garbage out in an area where the sanitation workers can get it easily so that we can move along," he said. "We've got a lot of work out there."
The commissioner estimated there was probably a little less than 50,000 tons of garbage waiting to be collected. But the cold temperatures mean the mounds of garbage, though unsightly, shouldn't pose a major health risk, Mr. Doherty said.
Although the mayor has taken responsibility for the slow snow cleanup, calling it inadequate and unacceptable, Mr. Doherty continued to defend his employees. "From my point of view they did an A-plus. From the public's point of view, we did probably a C-minus," he said.
City Council Member Letitia James, chairwoman of the council's Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, criticized Mr. Doherty for moving forward with limited garbage pick-up.
"Because the snow has melted thanks to Mother Nature," Ms. James said, "we should actually be doing full sanitation pick-up because the garbage here in central Brooklyn is mounting and we have rodent problems and raccoon problems."
In October, City Hall unveiled plans to demote 100 supervisors at the Department of Sanitation in hopes of saving money and boosting the number of sanitation workers available to pick up trash and plow snow. On Monday, Jason Post, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, confirmed that 55 of those possible demotions have been suspended.
"We are hopeful we can negotiate savings with the union," Mr. Post said. The other 45 have already been demoted.
These demotions fueled intense anger at the department. Both Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Doherty said they do not believe there was any deliberate effort by sanitation workers to botch the city's response to the blizzard, but the mayor has nevertheless ordered an investigation
Rose Gill Hearn, commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation, which is probing the possibility of a deliberate slowdown during the blizzard, said her agency has been working "24/7" on the probe.
The Sanitation Department has 400 fewer employees than it had two years ago. While the head of the sanitation union has suggested that the work force reduction contributed to the city's sluggish response to the storm, the mayor and Mr. Doherty have insisted that's not the case.
Credit : WSJ
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In Chinatown on Thursday, pedestrians snake through a narrow path cut through the snowbank and the garbage piles up days after the blizzard
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday his administration fulfilled a promise to plow every city street, but elected officials and others insisted some streets never saw a plow before the 7 a.m. deadline, marking another setback for the beleaguered mayor.
Mr. Bloomberg, who on Friday completes the first year of his third four-year term as the chief executive of the nation's largest city, has been besieged by a number of embarrassing episodes in recent weeks, with some saying he's endangering his image as an expert manager.
Council Member Debi Rose of Staten Island, who met with the mayor during his tour Thursday of every borough outside Manhattan, said she believes the city's sluggish response to the post-Christmas blizzard has dealt a serious blow to the mayor's reputation.
"This could be the straw that breaks New York City's back in terms of how well they think, a good job, the mayor has done," said Ms. Rose.
"I was stranded for three days myself. I could not get out," Ms. Rose said. "Something went drastically wrong with this snow removal."
The mayor said the administration plans to conduct a full investigation into the city's response to the storm. That probe will include examining allegations that disgruntled members of the Department of Sanitation deliberately slowed the snow removal as a protest.
Armed with a movie camera and tripod, Queens resident Jamie Stuart filmed scenes from the Christmas blizzard that clobbered New York City. His film, "Idiot With a Tripod," pays tribute to Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic "Man With a Movie Camera."
The mayor and Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty on Thursday said they don't believe there was a coordinated slowdown.
"I don't think it took place but we're going to do an investigation to make sure that it didn't," Mr. Bloomberg said. "It would be an outrage if it took place. But I just don't know."
During a news conference in Queens, Mr. Bloomberg again conceded that his administration's response to the storm was both "inadequate and unacceptable," an about-face from his defiant stance during the early portion of the cleanup effort.
"Clearly the response to this storm has not met our standards or the standards that New Yorkers have come to expect from us," he said. "The long delays in plowing some of the city streets should not have happened. We're not making excuses."
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At the same time, Mr. Bloomberg said the city met its commitment to plow every street, except those blocked by stranded vehicles, at least once by 7 a.m. Thursday.
The mayor estimated there were about a dozen of those blocked roads in one section of Brooklyn and a handful of others elsewhere.
Some city residents and elected officials disputed the mayor's contention.
"We still have quite a few blocks that have not been touched, still have quite a few blocks," Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz said.
He added: "There is no excuse for this—absolutely no excuse. This was an outrage."
Moments after the mayor finished speaking, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, who hadn't been invited to speak, approached the lectern to dispute the mayor's remarks.
A newborn baby died after the blizzard in Brooklyn, New York, as his mother waited for an ambulance to arrive. Video courtesy of Fox News.
"Most of the roads, even where I live, there's still about four inches right where the cars and everything go," she said. During the last several days, she said, residents from nearly every section of Queens called her office, saying, "Where is the plow? Where is the plow?"
For the mayor, the poor response to the snow storm comes on the heels of federal prosecutors arresting six people on charges of stealing $80 million allocated to the city's long-delayed computerized payroll system, known as CityTime.
The mayor's critics have lambasted Mr. Bloomberg for failing to police the CityTime project. In recent months, the mayor has also taken heat from some for the city's uptick in homicides, his plans to close fire companies, the secretive process for selecting the new schools chancellor and for failing to stand up enough for the working poor.
"It's been all malaise, no magic, thus far in the third term, with a record number of working poor New Yorkers now relying on food stamps and feeling invisible to and forgotten by this mayor," said Dan Morris, a spokesman for a coalition seeking a living wage law.
A mayoral spokesman, Stu Loeser, responded by saying: "We're proud that New York City led the nation for job creation over the last year, often creating jobs at twice the rate of the rest of the country."
Mr. Bloomberg said on Thursday he believes his campaign to seek a third term was the right decision for both him and the city.
"One of the reasons I wanted to run again was that we're going to be going through some very difficult times and it's never easy to go through difficult times," he said. "Bad times require a dedication and a commitment and a desire to make sure that this city comes through."
The mayor said he's more committed than ever to lead the city. While he accepted some responsibility for some of the administration's shortcomings, he said, "There's an awful lot of good numbers out there, as well."
Mr. Markowitz, who supported the mayor's bid for a third term, said "this is not the shining moment" for Mr. Bloomberg.
"But in anyone's life, you have ups and downs," Mr. Markowitz said. "He'll be up again."
At least 28 flights, carrying thousands of passengers, became stranded on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, one for close to 11 grueling hours, in the aftermath of this week’s paralyzing blizzard, officials said. The flights had one thing in common: they all began outside the United States.
This year, federal officials enacted a rule that penalizes airlines with hefty fines if planes are kept on the tarmac for more than three hours. But the new rule applies only to flights that begin and end in the United States.
The Transportation Department has been considering expanding the rule to include international flights and the strandings could force the agency to act.
“It was horrible,” said Shoham Elazar, 24, a dental student from Miami who arrived at Kennedy on Tuesday on Turkish Airlines Flight 1 from Istanbul. After a flight of about 10 hours, the plane sat on the tarmac for more than six hours before it could unload.
“After they announced it would be another hour and a half after the original hour and a half, it became pandemonium,” she said. “People were walking around, moaning, yelling. Children were screaming. People were complaining about children screaming.”
Kate Hanni, executive director of Flyers Rights, a passenger advocacy group that she formed after she was stuck for many hours on a tarmac in 2006, said, “This J.F.K. event, I’m almost certain, will be the tipping point.” After Ms. Hanni’s experience, a succession of similar, highly publicized ordeals led to the federal rule for domestic flights.
Ms. Hanni said that new federal rules should include an extension of the tarmac waiting penalties to international flights.
The effect of the domestic flight policy was starkly on display in the storm’s aftermath this week.
Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the region’s three major airports, said four domestic flights of American Eagle airlines experienced delays of more than two hours waiting for a gate after arriving at La Guardia Airport on Tuesday. But in each case, he said, the passengers were unloaded from the planes by bus and taken to the terminal before the three-hour cutoff.
Mr. Coleman said that was not possible with the international flights at Kennedy because the passengers would need to be held in a secure area before going through immigration and customs. He said there was no suitable area at the airport for that.
The storm, which lasted throughout the day Sunday, dumped about 20 inches of snow at Kennedy and was accompanied by high winds. The airport shut down at 7 p.m. Sunday and did not reopen until 6 p.m. Monday. When it reopened, there was a long backlog of departing and arriving flights.
The international flights that became stranded on Tuesday had taken off without checking in advance to see if a gate would be available when they arrived, Mr. Coleman said. When they got on the ground in New York, there were no empty gates and the waiting began.
The Port Authority said that at least 28 international flights were stuck on the tarmac with long delays. That included Cathay Pacific Flight 840 from Hong Kong, which arrived at 2:15 a.m. Tuesday and was not able to get to a gate until about 1 p.m., nearly 11 hours later, Mr. Coleman said.
China Airlines Flight 12 from Taipei, which stopped over in Anchorage, arrived at Kennedy at 8:37 p.m. Tuesday and was not able to unload at a gate until 5:47 a.m. Wednesday, more than nine hours later. For passengers who started out in Taipei, the total duration of the trip, including the wait on the tarmac, was more than 25 hours.
Of the more than two dozen flights for which the Port Authority supplied information about the duration of the delays, all had waits of more than three hours, and 11 waited on the tarmac for more than six hours before reaching a gate. Mr. Coleman said that the authority was still compiling information and that the total number of stranded flights might increase. He said no flights that arrived on Wednesday had delays of longer than three hours, however.
The new tarmac waiting rule for domestic flights went into effect in late April. Olivia Alair, a Transportation Department spokeswoman, said there were 12 reported cases from May 1 to Sept. 30 of domestic flights that spent more than three hours on the tarmac. In that period a year ago, there were 535 flights with waits that exceeded three hours. Ms. Alair said the agency was investigating the 12 cases from this year and had not yet levied any fines. Airlines can be fined $27,500 a passenger for delays that violate the rule.
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
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday that snow plows had been down every street in the city except for those still blocked by stuck cars. He said that tow trucks would have those vehicles clear in the afternoon, and that plows would return to streets still buried.
But, as he did the day before, Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged that the city’s response was “inadequate and unacceptable” and said that his office would conduct an extensive review of what went wrong.
“We’re not making excuses,” he said. “The response to the storm has not met our standards or the standards that New Yorkers have come to expect from us.”
“When something goes wrong we find out why it went wrong and we roll up our sleeves and fix it,” he said. “The response to this snowstorm was inadequate and unacceptable.”
Mr. Bloomberg held a news conference in Queens after visits to Staten Island and Brooklyn where he spoke with residents about their snowbound plights. (He is to go to the Bronx in the afternoon.) He said that 1,600 plows and other equipment were clearing streets Thursday alongside 2,000 day laborers hired to shovel out bus stops and snow piles. The last of the 600 buses that were stuck have been freed, he added.
John J. Doherty, the sanitation commissioner, said he would look into claims that his department’s rank-and-file deliberately slowed down the cleanup work to protest budget cuts.
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As New Yorkers' fury intensified at the sight of streets still covered with snow, Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday acknowledged the city's response to the blizzard was "a lot worse" than previous storms and he voiced enormous dismay with the performance of the 911 system.
"My heart really does go out to those who experienced trauma and tragedy during the storm," said Mr. Bloomberg following reports of people who died waiting for ambulances to arrive. "We take our emergency life-saving responsibilities very seriously and I'm extremely dissatisfied with the way our emergency-response systems performed."
Scott McCartney looks back at the year in air travel and explains why it was a turbulent one for passengers, including the recent blizzard that paralyzed the East Coast and the Iceland volcano that grounded planes in Europe earlier in the year.
Mr. Bloomberg, speaking at a hardware store in the Bronx, said the city's 911 system became overwhelmed by the deluge of calls. On Monday, the city received more than 49,400 calls to 911, the sixth-largest volume in history, resulting that night in a backlog of roughly 1,700 calls to the NYPD and FDNY.
The mayor has ordered a comprehensive review of the 911 call-taking and dispatch functions, as some of the loved ones of those who died have taken to the airwaves to express their grief and anger at the city's sluggish response to the storm.
The administration is examining, among other things, whether ambulances should have taken different routes, and whether emergency personnel should have parked farther away from scenes and walked.
More than 48 hours after the last flake fell, a large swath of southern Brooklyn, parts of western Queens and areas of Staten Island remained covered with snow. Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said he expected to have "all the streets" in the city plowed by 7 a.m. Thursday.
As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, the Sanitation Department said 100% of "primary" streets citywide had been plowed, 96% of "secondary" streets and 89% of "tertiary" streets.
The mayor, who has been the target of withering criticism from elected officials and residents, many of whom supported his controversial bid for a third term, conceded his administration failed to respond properly to the blizzard. The mayor speculated as to why—such as an unusually high number of stranded vehicles blocking roads and strong winds deterring snow removal—but he said he couldn't offer any firm conclusions yet.
"We did not do as good a job as we wanted to do or as the city has a right to expect," the mayor said. "I cannot tell you for sure why it was a lot worse this time than the other times."
Still, the mayor offered a strong defense of Mr. Doherty, insisting the commissioner will serve the remaining three years of the mayor's term. "This is the best sanitation commissioner this city has ever had. Period. Bar none," Mr. Bloomberg said.
The region's transportation network continued its slow return to normalcy Wednesday. Its three commuter railroads ran close to their usual service, and gaps in subway service caused by the snow were filled in.
There were just over 250 cancellations at the region's three airports, down from 1,000 Tuesday. The airports handle 3,000 flights on an average day.
"Things are slowly but surely getting back to normal," said Ron Marsico, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Armed with a movie camera and tripod, Queens resident Jamie Stuart filmed scenes from the Christmas blizzard that clobbered New York City. His film, "Idiot With a Tripod", pays tribute to Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic "Man With a Movie Camera."
But snow-covered roads continued to slow buses. Many routes were detoured or delayed, especially in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.
In Brooklyn, some major thoroughfares remained clogged, sections of sidewalks were covered with snow and garbage cans overflowed with rubbish. At Lincoln Place and Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, cars began double parking along the snowbanks in the intersection.
Yellow-cab driver David Baker, who made it 50 feet from a garage before his cab became stuck, estimated he's lost $1,500 in earnings as a result of the storm. "I can't get through the street. Nobody is helping me," said Mr. Baker, who noted he's always supported the mayor. "Things happen, but he can do better than that."
At the corner of Cortelyou Road and Argyle Street in Ditmas Park, Liena Zagare, a 34-year-old local blogger, took it upon herself to shovel the crosswalk. She cleaned the crosswalk on both sides of the street five times in the past few days, she said. Argyle Street, a side road, was "plowed for the first time around lunchtime" Wednesday, she said.
"I got tired of watching people not be able to cross, stopping and staring sadly," she said.
Ditmas Park, which is served only by the B and Q trains, had been without subway service until Wednesday, and buses have been running "once in a blue moon," she said.
Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, borrowing the mayor's words for the Board of Elections' botched handling of the September primary, has called the city's response to the storm a "royal screw-up."
In an interview on CNN, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said, "People are mad and they have every right to be mad and I really understand that anger....Almost every other storm in memory the city has done so much better than this."
Mr. Doherty said his department has set a "very high standard" with previous storm responses and "unfortunately" this time didn't meet that standard. But, he said, "I'm not here to make excuses right now."
The mayor promised to do better in the future.
"The results were not what we'd like them to be, but it has not been for lack of effort," he said. "We'll find what was different this time and try doing everything we can to make sure it's better next time."
More than 24 hours after a blizzard dropped its last bit of snow, many New Yorkers struck by medical emergencies endured excruciating hours waiting for help to arrive.
When it did, ambulances trapped by snow had to park blocks away from medical victims stranded on residential streets yet to be plowed. And paramedics hauled victims over snowbanks and long stretches of slushy streets.
One of the most treacherous areas was South Brooklyn.
Dominick Caratozzolo, 63 years old, of Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, suffered an apparent heart attack on Monday morning and died before paramedics arrived, more than 3 ½ hours later. Fire officials said a 911 call was placed from his apartment at 8:09 a.m. Firefighters arrived at 9:40 a.m, and emergency responders showed up at 11:42 a.m., officials said. The patient was declared dead at the scene.
Joseph Lupio, whose brother-in-law Dominick Caratozzolo died from a apparent heart attack Monday before paramedics could arrive.
"They made him die. They could have saved him," said Joseph Lupio, the victim's brother-in-law. "They worked at him, but it was too late. He was already blue." Mr. Lupio said it took another 28 hours for a city medical examiner to pick up the body, which had been resting in a bag on a bed.
A backlog of more than 1,300 emergency calls piled up Monday afternoon as ambulances were stuck or ran out of gas, some with patients inside. On Monday, there were 6,300 EMS calls, almost double the number on a normal day, officials said.
Annie O'Daly, 58, of Bay Ridge, waited for more than 30 hours for an ambulance after she slipped on a marble saddle at the door of her home on 76th Street at 7 p.m. Sunday, said her husband, James Leonhardt, who was shoveling snow at the time. He said she landed in a squatting position with her left leg bent sideways.
"It was just a nightmare," Ms. O'Daly said Tuesday evening over the phone. "The thing was, it never should have happened. Those streets should have been plowed."
As his wife, wearing pajamas, writhed in pain outside, Mr. Leonhardt called 911 for an ambulance around 7:20 p.m., he said. "They told me it was en route." Two hours later, he carried her indoors and placed her on a mattress lugged downstairs. Her husband said she passed out a couple of times during the night.
Mr. Leonhardt said he called 911 several more times to no avail and contacted a private ambulance service the next morning; it arrived at 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday. Several patrolmen and EMTs hoisted her over a 3-foot snowbank to Fourth Avenue, where an ambulance waited and took her to Lutheran Medical Center. She had X-rays and was told she had broken her ankle, tibia and fibula, she said.
During the ordeal, Ms. O'Daly said she thought of others worse off—the story of a stuck climber in Utah who cut off his arm with a penknife several years ago, as well as troops in Iraq. "All these things were going through my head," she said. "It was just awful. That and my rosary beads got me through."
On Tuesday morning, a heart-attack victim in Gerritsen Beach waited more than 70 minutes after calling 911 before being transported to an ambulance, which couldn't get closer than three or four blocks from the residence, said John Czap, chief of the Gerritsen Beach Volunteer Fire Department. He said his own ambulance tried to assist the victim but got stuck blocks away.
In another case, a stroke victim on Monday waited at least an hour before his ambulance service reached her home in the same neighborhood, Mr. Czap said.
He said his crew arrived at the victim's house about 15 minutes after receiving a call from the city fire department. Firefighters were on scene but couldn't get a city ambulance because of the weather, he said.
They drove the patient to a hospital on Kings Highway but couldn't get the ambulance past the snow-clogged entrance, he said. So they enlisted hospital workers to ferry the victim on a stretcher waist-high across a highway lane and a service road.
"I'm in my 60s. The last time I remember seeing snowplows, ambulances and buses totally stuck in snowdrifts had to be in the mid-1960s," said Mr. Czap.
The backlog of emergency calls was whittled down to 166 calls and 40 stuck ambulances by Tuesday morning, said Steve Ritea, an FDNY spokesman. Officials said 168 ambulances were bailed out at least once.
Mr. Ritea said he couldn't provide the average response time or how many ambulances were operable. Most of the calls weren't life-threatening, and the most critical calls were given a higher priority, he said.
The city called around for help. Nearby counties and New Jersey provided 36 ambulances, officials said.
"We had a tremendous number of calls yesterday despite very difficult conditions and did our best to respond, prioritizing life-threatening emergencies," said Mr. Ritea. "But we added extra units to help deal with the additional calls."
Fritz Rice of the Dutch Bike Co. is the clever rider behind these makeshift snow tires, and while he admits they look a bit silly (and that some fixie-riding hipsters may have pioneered the idea), he seems pretty thrilled with the results:
I can accelerate, brake, and corner with aplomb, even on the vile snowpack/sheet ice mix the plows leave in the bike lanes. The zip ties dig nicely into the hardest packed surfaces, but they're thin enough not to bounce the bike around at low speed or on short pavement sections.
![[SNOW1]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_v6ld1n-RVAE80lJ99v5CC9Pt0gxtPdzwQVMAx_2jFVxe9q6mHkXLuPsR5yCWR-H4Y32sed0E2T87Nx5Wzzqxa2ELUnUB1WVZpqaUI6J154Wv9pX_tpsjDckN6CKL0Kdlcn2xFJBlAmoffdMg0I5ACk=s0-d)
Trains and planes slowly started running again Tuesday across the New York region, while many streets remained buried in snow and Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to fend off criticism of the city's response to the fourth blizzard of his administration.
Elected officials and residents lashed out at Mr. Bloomberg for what they called the city's sluggish and inadequate response to the post-Christmas storm, prompting a chastened mayor to plead for patience as he promised officials were "doing everything we possibly can."
Even some of Mr. Bloomberg's allies—many of whom supported his successful bid last year for a third term—said they were outraged by the slow response that has endangered lives and left many roads impassable 24 hours after the snow stopped falling.
"The mayor needs to stop acting like Baghdad Bob and saying every thing's OK when we can see with our own eyes that clearly it's not," said Queens Council Member Peter Vallone Jr., who crossed party lines to endorse the mayor last year. "Talking about going to Broadway plays when there is a public-safety emergency happening in Queens is irresponsible."
Scott McCartney takes a look at the air travel headaches resulting from the blizzard that slammed the East Coast this week and why it could take until the weekend to get things back to normal. Plus, why Wall Street is optimistic about GM.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has taken heat for siding with Mr. Bloomberg on controversial issues, said she would hold hearings on the city's response in January.
"By all accounts, the collective storm response was not anywhere near up to the standards New Yorkers are accustomed to," she said. "This is unacceptable."
The mayor, speaking at the Office of Emergency Management headquarters in Brooklyn, insisted this storm is "not unlike any other we've had to deal with," a position some elected officials and residents question. Still, trying to strike a conciliatory tone in the face of rampant criticism, the mayor acknowledged New Yorkers are still "coping with serious hardship."
"The bottom line is we are doing everything we possibly can, and pulling every resource from every possible place to meet the unique challenges that this storm is posing," he said.
But the mayor became irked when reporters began questioning him. When asked if he regretted the response, he replied, "I regret everything in the world." At one point, he said "complaining doesn't help," and, at another point, he noted, "I'm angry, too."
The mayor's aides have said Mr. Bloomberg, now in his third term, holds himself accountable for whatever happens on his watch but stands by his record during the past nine years.
Abandoned cars and buses clogged city streets, foiling attempts to plow them. Mr. Bloomberg said that was the key difference between this storm and others. Speaking at around noon Tuesday, he said it would likely take about 24 hours before all streets were plowed, but cautioned that it could take longer.
From Sunday evening to Monday, police and authorized private tow trucks removed 1,000 vehicles from three major city thoroughfares alone: the Gowanus Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway and the Cross Bronx Expressway, a police spokesman said. The number of disabled or abandoned vehicles towed from other streets wasn't immediately available. "We don't remember towing that many cars in such a short period—not in recent memory," said New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne.
Some 250 Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses—out of a total fleet of 6,000—remained stranded Tuesday afternoon, down from a peak of 500, an agency spokesman said. Bus service remained slow and unreliable.
The city's transportation network, meanwhile, was slowly starting up again after being all but shut down for much of Monday. Metro-North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road both said they would be running a close-to-normal complement of trains Wednesday after running limited service Tuesday. Service had been restored on much of the subway system, but the MTA expected some outages to continue Tuesday night. Airports were open, but they faced severe delays.
The busy intersection of 86th Street and Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge was a microcosm of the upheaval on city streets Tuesday afternoon.
The U.S. East Coast was slowly digging out early Tuesday after a gargantuan year-end blizzard unleashed snow from Georgia to Maine, shutting down airports, grounding flights and crippling rail and bus transport services. Video courtesy of Fox News.
A B8 bus that had been stuck in the snow since Sunday night straddled both southbound lanes of traffic between 85th and 86th streets, reducing traffic in both directions to one lane. MTA workers with shovels dug along the tires while a snowplow removed a large mound of snow in front. They were finally able to get the bus loose at 1:45 p.m. The driver rocked the bus back and forth several times before shaking it loose. Cars facing the wrong direction were left abandoned, further hampering the cleanup.
Residents along side streets expressed their frustration. On 85th Street, Demi Liapis complained about a yellow taxi that was stuck in the middle of the street. She said it was the reason plows hadn't once come down the street. "It's ridiculous," she said.
The cab's owner, Abdul Dil was only a block away from home when he got stuck at 2 a.m. Monday while looking for a parking spot. He spent Monday with the cab trying to flag down tow trucks and snow-removal crews to help dig him out, all the while enduring the wrath of residents on the block. He said they even called the taxi company to complain.
Mr. Dil said his son finally came from New Jersey with a few friends, and they were working to dig out the taxi yesterday afternoon. Any delay costs him money—he pays $200 dollars a day to lease it.
A tour of other side streets showed that even blocks completely clear of vehicles had still yet to be plowed.
The trouble led at least one elected official, Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, to call for the resignation of Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty. But Mr. Bloomberg Tuesday called the city officials managing the cleanup "the best in the country to lead the city."
In an interview on New York One, Mr. Doherty acknowledged that the storm "got ahead of us"—and that he was forced to use workers who had less training than usual. Because of budget cuts, the city used 100 sanitation workers who were undertrained, he said. The city is down 400 sanitation workers from two years ago.
"They only went to school for two weeks, they usually would go for a month," Mr. Doherty said of the employees. "I put them out there on Sunday. I said, 'You're out on the street.' They said: 'We've only had a couple days of driving.'" He said he told them, "You're going to learn on the job, real time, real conditions, get the job done."
The outcry over the snow removal also raised the specter of the mayoralty of John Lindsay. Slow cleanup in Brooklyn and Queens from a 1969 blizzard after the city had weathered a series of crippling strikes crystallized discontent with his administration.
"Mayors throughout the country realize that responses to snowstorms are a very symbolic thing," said Vincent Cannato, the author of a recent biography of Mr. Lindsay called "The Ungovernable City." "It's a direct way that citizens interact with city government. There's an expectation that roads will be cleared in a reasonable time."
