New York, NY – Winter Storm Warning In Effect For Five Boroughs

New York, NY – New York City is about to confront its third snowstorm in less than three weeks, a day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration admitted a series of mistakes in its handling of a Christmas weekend blizzard and promised immediate changes.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch from Tuesday evening through Wednesday afternoon, with the heaviest snowfall expected overnight.

New York City and its suburbs could get 6 to 12 inches of snow, with reduced visibility and wind gusts up to 35 mph, forecasters said. Bloomberg was scheduled to hold a briefing around midday.

The first snowfall this winter came Dec. 26 at the tail of a holiday weekend, dropping 29 inches of snow in Staten Island, 2 feet in Brooklyn and 20 inches in Central Park.

Bloomberg’s commissioners and a top deputy spent more than four hours at a City Council hearing about the cleanup Monday, fielding questions about why so many streets went unplowed, ambulances and buses became stuck and 911 calls backed up.

“We didn’t do the job that residents of New York City expected,” said Stephen Goldsmith, Bloomberg’s deputy mayor of operations. “There were a lot of mistakes made, we acknowledge those. We’re here to learn from those mistakes and promise to do better in the future.”

Goldsmith apologized to the city and the council for the many failures, including not briefing the mayor adequately at the start. The cleanup has damaged Bloomberg’s reputation as a no-nonsense manager.

Officials recounted an extensive list of errors, beginning when commissioners 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.

Officials said late Monday that a snow emergency has not been ruled out for this latest storm.

Other changes in the city’s snowstorm response include the use of global positioning devices on some sanitation trucks, which was also tried during the second snowstorm, a weak 2-inch dusting last week.

The other tactic tested last week — observers trolling the city with video cameras sending live feeds back to emergency command — will also be repeated.

Both those measures are intended to beef up the real-time information that emergency commanders have about the conditions of the streets — something they said Monday was woefully lacking during the post-Christmas blizzard.

Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano also said all ambulances are being outfitted with “sled-like devices” that could be used to transport patients through snow.

And the department will soon test out a new type of snow chain 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.

Joseph Bruno, commissioner of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, was 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.

Bruno acknowledged that 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 long after the 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.

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 how we feel on their behalf.”

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