BLAZ DODGES BLAME
Defiant de Blasio faults forecasters, Mother Nature and ‘perfect storm’
Mayor de Blasio on Friday deflects blame from himself onto Mother Nature as storm stranded thousands for up to six hours and delayed him — for 25 minutes.
Common man Mayor de Blasio said there was no need for him to apologize to New Yorkers for Thursday's crippling sleet show, because behind all the trappings of City Hall and an Upper East Side mansion, he's just one of us.
While the rest of the commuting public was stuck for hours on the West Side Highway, or packed like cattle at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or waiting an eternity for a road crew to clear a pile-up on the George Washington Bridge, de Blasio, urban everyman, was stuck in traffic for a whopping 25 minutes.
De Blasio, at a City Hall press conference the day after a 6-inch snowstorm nearly ground the nation's largest city to a halt, said he had left Gracie Mansion for an event at 6:30 p.m., and wound up in “crazy traffic” on the FDR Drive that made him about 25 minutes late to an event at Gramercy Tavern.
“We all go through the same exact experience,” de Blasio, in a radio interview, told New Yorkers who don't have a security detail or a vehicle equipped with lights and a siren.
“Some really unfortunate things happened that we do not want to see ever happen again,” de Blasio said later. “I was a public school parent, I never want to see public school parents go through what they went through last night. It was not a lot of kids, thank God, but for anyone who experienced it, it was absolutely unfair.”
Traffic was so bad Thursday evening that some students had to spend hours waiting at school when their buses didn't show up. Other students who did get picked up spent hours on the road to get home.
Workers still fuming over the city's sluggish snowstorm response were back on the roads and rails early Friday, with schools open at their usual times and more sludge to trudge through.
Those waiting for the mayor to say “I'm” and “sorry” in the same sentence will have to do what they did for hours and hours after the snow fell — wait.
“I want to say look, I am very frustrated with what happened. I think it was a horrible experience for New Yorkers. I am upset that New Yorkers went through it,” de Blasio said. “I don't think it's fair to say that the city agencies could have stopped all of this. I'm not going to do that, because I think that's just too convenient.”
Hizzoner convened a news conference with his top commissioners to try to break down what went wrong — blaming the hours of gridlock on what he deemed a “perfect storm” — one that brought several more inches of wet snow than was forecast, and which hit too late to warn people not to drive to and from work.
That, combined with a 20-car pileup that closed the George Washington Bridge's upper level, and wet leaves
that brought down an unusual number of trees, left many New Yorkers stranded.
The mayor vowed to undertake a review of what went wrong — from the operations of the Sanitation Department to those of the Department of Education, whose erratic busing system is already undergoing an overhaul.
At various times during the storm, the Sanitation Department had between 350 and 700 plows on the city’s roads — well below the 1,600 they would deploy in the biggest snow storms. Complicating matters was that the department had not gone to the so-called “split shifts,” or two 12-hour shifts, instead sticking to three shifts.
Plows typically cannot operate unless 2 inches of snow have accumulated.
“We were planning for a 1-inch event, which was going to be primarily our salt spreaders,” Commissioner Kathryn Garcia said. “We did add plows to that in the late morning, when we started to get rumblings that maybe something would happen.”
The city didn’t get a more significant snowfall forecast from the National Weather Service until shortly after noon on Thursday, de Blasio said.
“You’re hearing 1 inch or 2o inches and that’s salt only,” he said. “Suddenly it’s literally afternoon when you hear for the first time this has suddenly jumped up.”
De Blasio’s lack of remorse didn’t stop another top city official from stepping up and taking responsibility.
“For New Yorkers who sat in three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine hours of traffic last night, I’m sorry,” said Council Speaker Corey Johnson. “We need to do a better job. And the Council will do our part to make sure that we have a transparent process and review to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Asked if the mayor owes New Yorkers an apology, Johnson said there was snow way he was touching that one.
“I apologized. I apologized,” he said. “I’m not going to tell the mayor how to talk and how to communicate.”
Johnson, who spoke to reporters in front of downed trees in his Chelsea district, said there were 1,323 service requests for downed or damaged trees as of Friday morning — 384 in Brooklyn, four in the Bronx, 528 in Manhattan, 363 in Queens and 44 in Staten Island.