NYC mayor: More could’ve been done on snow response

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Northeasterners scraped and shoveled Wednesday after a snowstorm grounded flights, shuttered schools and buried roads with a surprising amount of snow, leaving biting cold in its wake. The atmosphere was particularly frosty in New York, where the new mayor acknowledged flaws in the cleanup, and some residents complained that schools remained open while children elsewhere in the region stayed home.

The storm stretched from Kentucky to New England but hit hardest along the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor between Philadelphia and Boston. As much as 14 inches of snow fell in Philadelphia, with New York City seeing almost as much, and parts of Massachusetts were socked with as many as 18 inches. Temperatures were in the single digits or the teens in many places Wednesday.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio, facing one of the first flashpoints of his weeks-old tenure, initially defended what he called a “coordinated, intense, citywide response” to a storm he said caused a worse-than-expected headache when it ramped up at rush hour. And de Blasio, who campaigned on closing gaps between rich and poor city residents, at first rebuffed complaints that the effort had lagged on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, saying “no one was treated differently.”

But he backtracked Wednesday evening, saying he’d determined “more could have been done to serve the Upper East Side.”

Thirty more vehicles and nearly 40 more sanitation workers were sent to the area to finish the cleanup, de Blasio said in a statement that noted he still felt the citywide response, overall, “was well-executed.”

In a city where snow removal has proved a political hot potato, the flap was almost a mirror image of complaints about how de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, handled a 2010 blizzard. Bloomberg, who lives on the Upper East Side, faced criticism that outer boroughs had gotten short shift from plows. Brooklyn-dwelling de Blasio, then the city’s public advocate, was among the critics.

This time, de Blasio found himself being asked why some Upper East Side avenues still were covered in snow when a Brooklyn thoroughfare was plowed clear to the pavement.

Pamela Murphy Jennings’ two children navigated snowy sections of Madison and Park avenues to get to their public schools on the Upper East Side, she said.

“Children have to walk to city bus stops and cross these streets to get here,” she said. “Cars are sliding on roads. If there was any day to close schools, this was the day.”

The Department of Education said Wednesday’s attendance rate was only 47.1 percent — far below the average daily attendance rate of about 90 percent for the 1.1 million students who make up the nation’s largest public school system.

Traffic and the storm’s timetable complicated the cleanup, Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said. The storm arrived earlier than expected Tuesday and intensified right around the evening rush, making it difficult to plow and spread salt, Doherty said.

Elsewhere, the storm was blamed for at least one death — a driver was ejected from a car that fishtailed into the path of a tractor-trailer on a snow-covered Maryland road. Authorities were investigating three suspected weather-related deaths in Pennsylvania’s Delaware County, outside Philadelphia; and a preliminary investigation showed weather conditions played a role in a two-vehicle crash that killed two people in Prince George’s County, Md.