De Blasio’s Unending Ida Idiocy

Mayor de Blasio is trying to dodge the blame for New York City’s walloping by Ida. As usual, it’s a pack of bull. The pouring rain and catastrophic flooding killed 13 New Yorkers, including eight who drowned in basement apartments.

At first, de Blasio blamed weather forecasters for not warning him. Yet the NWS Weather Prediction Center put out a warning just after 3 p.m. Wednesday of “significant and locally life-threatening flash flooding.” In response, Blas . . . went on TV to tout his administration’s COVID-19 protocols and (LOL) hint at a possible gubernatorial run.

By Friday, he was promising to do better on pre-storm evacuations and so on. Oh, and trying to blame the “new world” brought by climate change — as if climate change were news to him, when he’s been imposing huge costs on everyone in the name of fighting it.

Even as he’s failed to make a city slammed by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 more resilient.

In 2019, city Comptroller Scott Stringer told de Blasio to speed up such spending, releasing an audit that showed the city had failed to use $8.1 billion in federal funds to recover from Sandy and guard against future storms. As of this July, the US Department of Transportation said the city still had spent only $4.3 billion of $10 billion total.

Columbia prof Klaus Jacob flagged another issue: The money the city did spend went only to guard against storm tides — not catastrophic rainfall: “Our drainage system doesn’t have enough capacity.”

Maybe the next mayor will focus on true threats to the city, rather than on his own laughable ambitions.