Bloomberg Fights to Save Reputation

A testy Mayor Bloomberg fended off criticism of the city’s failure to clear hundreds of snow-choked streets Tuesday as an avalanche of critics attacked his reputation as a supermanager.

“This mayor prides himself on saying the buck stops with him, and it should. We hold him responsible for what we’re calling the Bloomberg Blizzard,” said CityCouncilman David Greenfield (D-Brooklyn).

“The whole world is laughing that the greatest city in the world cannot manage to clear the streets. New York today looks like a Third World country.”

Greenfield, normally a backer of the mayor, said every side street – and some larger avenues – in Borough Park were waiting for a plow 30 hours after the storm’s end.

Similar and worse complaints were heard from much of the snow-buried city outside Manhattan.

A Queens woman’s death Monday was blamed on the backlog of911 calls and on snow-clogged streets that delayed first responders from reaching her Corona home, said state Sen. Jose Peralta (D-Queens).

“Like many New Yorkers, I woke up two days straight to an unplowed street outside my frontdoor,” said city Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “This is not business as usual, and frustration is mounting.”

Bloomberg asked for patience.

“This storm is not like any other we’ve had to deal with,” he said. “We are doing everything we canthink of, working as hard as wecan.”

He traveled to hard-hit Brooklyn and acknowledged the anger of people whose streets hadn’t been plowed. “I’m angry, too,” he said.

Bloomberg insisted city workers were doing their best. “We won’t get to everybody every time,” he said. “Yelling about it and complaining doesn’t help.”

Still, the chorus of complaints about the city’s sluggish response was just getting revved up.

“This is unacceptable,” said CityCouncil Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan), who set a Jan. 10 hearing on how the storm was handled.

“The mayor has to stop acting like ‘Baghdad Bob’ saying the streets are fine. No they aren’t. Where the hell are the plows?” Councilman Peter Vallone (D-Queens) wrote on Facebook.

“Seniors are trapped at home with little or no food. Emergency vehicles aren’t able to respond to emergencies,” said Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn). “This lack of response from the city cannot go unanswered.”

Mike for President? Ha!

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. said city residents outside Manhattan scoffed at Bloomberg’s vaunted management skills. “He wants to run for President? Can you imagine a national catastrophe or crisis if hecan’t even plow the streets ofthe Bronx?” Diaz said.

State Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-Queens), who toured snow-entombed Jamaica, Far Rockaway and Cambria Heights, said he spotted just three plows in seven hours.

City officials said part of the problem was the nature of the wind-whipped storm, which quickly dumped a lot of wet snow that rapidly reburied plowed streets.

Another was timing: The unexpected blizzard warning went out on Christmas afternoon at 3:55p.m., after earlier forecasts called for a far milder storm.

Sanitation Department “employees should not have been sitting around unwrapping gifts -they should’ve been unwrapping salt and getting in their trucks,” said state Sen. Eric Adams(D-Brooklyn), who was among several pols urging Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty to fall on his sword.

“There’s no way you can have a failure of this magnitude and someone doesn’t give a letter of resignation.”

Doherty told New York 1 Tuesday that of the 4,800 workers staffing the plows, about 100 were rookies who were undertrained because of budget constraints.

“They only went to school for two weeks; they usually would go for a month,” Doherty said.

Greenfield said the city should have declared a snow emergency before the storm hit. That would have barred people from driving or parking on major streets.

Bloomberg said it was decided that “would have made the situation worse” because motorists would have been out reparking their cars as the storm hit.

At the height of the storm, the number of backlogged 911 calls hit 1,300, and heart attack victims waited up to an hour for help, sources said. One woman who went into labor and tried to walk to the hospital lost her baby.

Forty ambulances were still stuck in snowdrifts Tuesday night.