Bloomberg Declares Weather Emergency

NEW YORK [WABC] — Mayor Bloomberg has declared a weather emergency ahead of the winter storm that is expected to dump significant snow on New York City.

It is short of a snow emergency. A snow emergency declaration would have kept private vehicles without snow tires or chains off designated snow routes and bans parking along those routes.

The lower level weather emergency means:

1. The public is urged to avoid all unnecessary driving during 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.

Earlier Tuesday. Bloomberg said the city has 365 salt trucks and 1700 plows ready to roll once the snow begins to tackle some 6,000 streets.

“We didn’t do the job with the last storm, and we are going to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” he said at a morning news conference.

Bloomberg said a decision on whether to close to New York City schools would be made at 5:00 a.m.

The mayor urged people to stay off the roads, which was a major problem during the holiday blizzard. He expected both the morning and evening commutes to be difficult.

As employed during last Friday’s storm, 50 trucks would be equipped with GPS systems. The city has ordered GPS systems for the entire fleet, but they are not yet available. He said snow scouts would be on the streets to monitor the situation and tow trucks would be ready to go if needed.

Bloomberg urged people to dial 311 for non-emergency calls and 911 for life-threatening emergency calls.

A plow and sander pre-treating some still snow-pocked Midtown streets early on Tuesday seemed evidence of the city’s heightened commitment not to make the same mistake twice.

“We didn’t do the job you expected,” Deputy Mayor of Operations Stephen Goldsmith said at a public hearing Monday. “We promise to do better in the future.”

More vigilance was among the promises made at the hearing, help to help figure out what went wrong after the holiday blizzard and how to fix it.

Certainly, questions are being asked over and over in outer-borough neighborhoods that went for days without seeing a plow.

‘It was very frustrating,“ East Flatbush resident Karen Fontenot said.

Fontenot says neighbors eventually cleared her block of East 22nd Street off Ditmas Avenue, not the city.

”Young guys from 448 and Seabrook and his little friends, they are the ones that got out here with the shovel and cleared the streets,“ Fontenot said.

To prevent that kind of lapse again, the mayor’s new 15-point action plan includes GPS equipped sanitation trucks and video scouts roaming the city, streaming live pictures of conditions to City Hall.

Also on the list: improve the process for declaring emergencies, enhance the ability to deploy city employees from other departments, and provide better methods for citizens to request help.

But Brooklyn resident Ray Crump says action plans don’t interest him.

”I’d like the city to come out and do what they’re supposed to do, stop putting the blame on other people and just get out here and do it,“ Crump said.

Bloomberg’s administration admitted multiple breakdowns in its decisions before, during and after the post-Christmas blizzard.

More than 100 ambulances became stuck as streets went unplowed and 911 calls backed up. Then, the overworked sanitation department fell behind on trash pickups, and garbage piled up.

With the latest winter storm taking aim at New York, Bloomberg’s officials endured the hourslong hearing that was intense at times but mostly polite. They recounted an extensive list of errors, describing the decision-making taking its first wrong turn when officials considered calling a snow emergency, but ultimately did not.

The declaration keeps private vehicles without snow tires or chains off designated snow routes and bans parking along those routes. The city last declared a snow emergency in 2005.

The administration now believes an emergency declaration might have kept more drivers off the road and triggered a more urgent response among city agencies and other authorities that use the declarations for guidance.

”Given the information available at the time, the decision not to declare an emergency was understandable,“ Goldsmith said. ”However, based on what we know now, an emergency declaration could have yielded a more successful response.“

Officials said the 15-point plan will help create a formal protocol for declaring snow emergencies.

Joseph Bruno, commissioner of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, also said the city waited too long to convene the task force of police, fire and sanitation tow trucks and front-end loaders that went out to free the multitudes of snowbound ambulances.

That did not happen until well into Monday, long after snow had stopped falling and several hours after emergency vehicles had been marooned, some with patients inside. Many New Yorkers who needed urgent medical care did not get it.

”We were too slow to recognize that the strategy we had in place wasn’t enough,“ Bruno said. ”We lost time in getting the right focus on the problem and getting in place the equipment we needed to solve it.“

Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano testified that the department is now testing out a new type of snow chains for ambulances. He said the city stopped using chains on ambulances 15 years ago, because many vehicles in the fleet were damaged repeatedly when chains broke off.

Cassano said all ambulances are also being outfitted with ”sledlike devices“ that could be used to transport patients through snow. Those would allow an ambulance to park at the end of an unplowed block, rather than turn down the street and risk becoming stuck.

Bruno was also questioned about the city’s decision not to open its emergency command center until 24 hours after the National Weather Service declared a blizzard warning for the area and just an hour before forecasts predicted the heaviest snow would arrive.

”I’m not an emergency expert,“ said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, ”but an hour seems to me not enough time to get everybody there and fully focused in the way that the command center does.“

Despite some intense questioning, the hearing was not explosive, as some had predicted. Lawmakers relayed their personal stories of frustrations and tragedies from their districts; many told the commissioners that days passed before plows showed up.

”People were scared, and then they were angry,“ said Councilman Mark Weprin, of Queens. ”And that’s how we feel now. That’s now we feel on their behalf.”

At one point during questioning, Councilwoman Letitia James stood up and heaved a loop of thick, heavy snow chains into the air, followed by a lighter, thinner version that she said was now being used on sanitation vehicles.

She asked if the less hardy-looking chains were due to budget cuts, but Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said the department had been seeking to change out its chains for years, and that the new chains cost and performed the same.

Federal and local officials are investigating the cleanup, including rumors that some sanitation workers purposely slowed their work as a labor action.