New York, NY – Snowblind Mayor Woke Up and Smelled the Catastrophe

New York, NY – Mayor Bloomberg finally joined his 8.4 million irate constituents yesterday in their fury at painfully slow efforts to clean up the snow-clogged streets that have brought New York to a standstill.

“I’m angry, too,” Bloomberg said at the Office of Emergency Management in Brooklyn, where he was peppered with questions about sluggish snowplows, stuck buses and ambulances, and thousands of impassable roadways.

“You can expect another 24 hours before we will get to everyone, and even then I’m not so sure.”

Striking a more understanding tone than the day before, Bloomberg admitted there are city streets that haven’t seen a plow since the last snowstorm — 10 months ago.

“Anyone who’s been outside recently can see that this storm is not like any other we’ve had to deal with, including the big blizzard of 2006,” Bloomberg said of the record-setting monster that dumped nearly 27 inches on the Big Apple back then.

The mayor defended his administration and city workers and dismissed the notion that Department of Sanitation crews were intentionally slowing down in retaliation for recent supervisor demotions. “We are doing everything we can to move forward, and making sure that we improve the situation rather than sitting there,” he said. “I don’t know whether we could’ve done things better or not . . . We’ve looked at some things that we probably could’ve done better.”

But his empathy had its limits. When Bloomberg was asked if he had regrets about the way the city handled the storm, he oozed sarcasm.

“I regret everything in the world,” he quipped.

The biggest obstacles are a tow-truck shortage and the storm’s unfortunate timing between Christmas and New Year’s, when many of the private operators are shut down or using skeleton crews, officials said.

“We’re not getting the tow trucks we need,” Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said, explaining why plows and emergency vehicles are having a tough time making it through some neighborhoods.

“We have cars [on the streets]. We have to dig them out. We can’t get through the streets, and that’s what’s impeding the operation in many ways.”

As Bloomberg spoke, some of his most ardent political allies vented their anger, recalling that the botched cleanup efforts of a major snowstorm in 1969 forever tarnished the reputation of another mayor, John Lindsay.

“By all accounts, the collective storm response was not anywhere near up to the standards New Yorkers are accustomed to,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a usually reliable Bloomberg friend. “This is unacceptable.”

The council is planning hearings for Jan. 10 to ask administration officials what went wrong.

More than 36 hours after the blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow in Central Park, its aftermath continued to wreak havoc across the five boroughs.

The mayor acknowledged that ambulances were still getting stuck — some with patients on board. He stressed, though, that the backlog in EMS calls — which reached over 1,300 Monday — was back to normal and that the NYPD call backlog was gone entirely.

Bloomberg said the city also got help from New York state and New Jersey in the form of 35 ambulances pressed into service to help the FDNY’s EMS crews reach residents experiencing medical emergencies.

More than 250 MTA buses were still stranded in drifting snow at midday — down from more than 1,000 the day before.

By late yesterday, entire sections of subway lines — including portions of the B and Q that are run in a trench and are exposed to the elements — were still out of service. So were portions of the Long Island Rail Road.

LIRR officials said they believe full service will be restored by today. The same was true for Metro-North and NJ Transit rail lines, which were also suspended at points during the blizzard.

The biggest problems yesterday were at the airports. Kennedy and La Guardia, which had been totally shut down at the peak of the storm, were reopened Monday night. But it will take until the weekend to catch up after thousands of canceled flights caused delays across the country.

The backups at Kennedy caused a domino effect all the way to Jamaica station, which handles passengers for both the AirTrain to JFK and the LIRR. With the AirTrain shut down and the LIRR still partially paralyzed, a crowd of more than a thousand fuming passengers built up at Jamaica, leading MTA cops to call the Port Authority for backup.

With its own problems at the airports, the PA at first wouldn’t send anyone, until senior officials at the MTA contacted the top executive at the PA, sources said.

Lou Gioi, 69, was among the crowd at Jamaica station after dropping off his family at JFK and then taking a PA shuttle bus back to the station.

Tempers flared so badly, Gioi said, that when one man moved too slowly getting off the shuttle bus, other riders pushed him out of the door, making him fall on the ground.

Across the borough, Leonard York was fuming that he’ll miss his aunt’s funeral in New Jersey because his street, 46th Avenue in Elmhurst, was never plowed.

“I’m snowed in, and the plow hasn’t even come in once since we got this storm,” said York, 89, who lives between 76th and 78th streets.

“[Calling] 311, you can’t get through at all, and I call Sanitation. I wasn’t plowed since this storm began, and they said they’ll get around to it.”

And in Brooklyn, George Shea was angered that his block, 10th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, hadn’t seen a plow as of last night.

“I’m not buying the argument that there are cars struck on the street,” he said. “There are no abandoned cars on this street.”