Mayor Bill de Blasio: …I’m frustrated too. I’m frustrated as a New Yorker who was stuck in traffic, like so many other people were. I’m frustrated as the Mayor of this city that for so many reasons people didn’t get what they should have had last night. Look, again, I have found a long time ago New Yorkers like straightforward explanations. They don’t like to be toyed around with. In truth, this was a kind of perfect storm. It emerged bigger and later than anyone expected, obviously affected the whole tristate area in a very severe way. We had exceptional dynamics like the 20-car pileup on the George Washington Bridge, knocking out the outbound lanes of the George Washington Bridge – something I can’t remember every happening before. We had the early time of year and the impact on the trees – and an extraordinary number of trees falling, something that hasn’t typically happened in a lot of our storms. But all of that gets back to a core reality, which is the timing.
So, we went into Wednesday night with estimates from the National Weather Service in the one-two inches of snow range. That’s not a snowstorm that any of us would be afraid of. That’s not a snowstorm where we’re going to use all of the emergency measures and tell people don’t go to work, and stay off the roads. We’ve had – I remind you, a lot of us have been through this together – The biggest snowstorm in New York City history – 28 inches, 29, whatever it was in the final analysis. There are times where we need to tell people, don’t even think about going to work, clear the roads, leave room for Sanitation. Wednesday night, we had no indication of that. Thursday morning, we had no indication of that. I said earlier, I referred to what has typically been the 11 am National Weather Service report. It turns out that the timing yesterday was later even than usual in terms of when we got the report – it was 12:36, yesterday. It was the first indication of three-to-five inches of snow. And again, normally, three-to-five inches of snow would not have posed this kind of problem.
It ended up coming exactly at the wrong time. It basically concentrated as the rush hour was beginning – heavy wet snow – heavier, faster than anyone expected. So, there are a lot of reasons why things ended up the way they did. But that said, we are trying to learn some lessons and figure out what we can do better.
So, the first thing we’re going to do is there will be a full audit review of everything that happened with the City agencies. We’re also going to sit with our State partners because everyone is connected here – MTA, Port Authority, everyone – we all have to work it through together. Deputy Mayor Fuleihan’s timing is impeccable – his team at the Office of Operations will lead that review. I think we’re going to find that a lot of this was exceptional and unusual and some of it beyond our control, but we’re also going to find areas where we can do better. The central concern I have is that we have as a City done well when we can get information out to people early and in a clear way. We don’t do as well when we don’t get information to folks. This one is tough because the information broke so late and I do think, in retrospect, we could have tried to say at 1 pm, let’s say, we’re headed for a much bigger situation, go home immediately, you know, leave work early. That might have helped. I think unfortunately to some extent the die was cast at that point – people had already brought their cars into the City. It might have had a helpful effect, but I’m not sure it would have averted the essence of what we went through.
So, we want to do that review because we need to do better, but we also understand the essence of all of this is having good information on a timely basis, and unfortunately that just was not the case yesterday.
At this moment, after a very difficult time yesterday, and I’ll say, I know everyone’s feeling – among the agencies here – we’re all unhappy with what happened, but I also want to say people worked very, very hard to try and address the situation that was exceedingly difficult. The agencies, I want to give particular thanks to the NYPD and the FDNY who spent the whole night trying to undo traffic jams and get trees out of roads under very adverse circumstances. I know Sanitation was trying to do all they could do, and a lot of times the core problem was they could not get to their locations because of the traffic. They needed to go back for salt and there was no way to get back to their resupply. So, people worked very hard, very intensely.
I want to say, as we got into the morning and finally Sanitation had the ability to get out into roads that were not clogged by traffic – I think they did a good job on the overnight, clearing up as much as possible and making things move better this morning. We still had some issues early in the morning in the Bronx. But, you know, in the final analysis, under very, very adverse circumstances, I want to just say, I think a lot of City agencies did everything they could do. But the essence of this, even if you say it’s, you know, an exceedingly unusual set of events that came together, we still can’t let it happen again and we have to learn from it, we have to drill for it. It was – in the final analysis, just over six inches of snow. That should not be able to have this impact on this city and we have to figure out a way in the future to make sure that that does not happen again.
Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, Department of Sanitation: So, yesterday, into the morning – we make our plans the day before because obviously we need to call people in – we were planning for a one-inch event, which is going to be primarily our salt spreaders. We did add plows to that in the late morning when we started to get that rumblings that maybe something else would happen. At that point in time, our staffing going into the afternoon, was allowing us to up to about 700 plows. We can – when we get very, very big, our biggest number for a blizzard would be about 1,600. So, there were points in time when we were between about 350 and 700 on the plowing side, depending on how many staff we had in, because we were in three shifts, we were not split.
They already all had been working that day. So, everybody did work that day, but some had worked midnight to eight on the overnight before, some were working six to six, and some were working, starting at 4 o’clock. All of them worked overtime but we were in a three unevenly split shifts.
Mayor de Blasio: I just want to amplify this. So, imagine you’re in Kathryn’s shoes and you’re hearing one inch, two inches, and that’s salt only – or salt essentially. And then suddenly, you know, literally, it’s afternoon when you hear for the first time this thing has suddenly jumped up. Now, I will say, one of the things we’re going to work on – and this is not a diss on the National Weather Service, they do extraordinary work – but, you know, we have been burned a few times, not because they’re not trying but because weather’s unpredictable. I think we’re going to start being even more conservative. But even if you said, let’s throw on a few more inches, as Kathryn said, our biggest – you know, when you have a blizzard, 20 inches, 25 inches, 28 inches – like, that’s when it’s all hands on deck. When it’s two inches, three inches, four inches, you couldn’t imagine something like this possibly becoming what happened yesterday. Nonetheless, we have to figure out how to make the right adjustments.
Again, that’s why I try to give you an extensive straightforward opening, that I think there were some limits about what we could do honestly. And again, my job is to offer New Yorkers straight-talk, not platitudes. If the fuller facts became available after 12:30 and rush hour began – rush hour officially begins at 3:30-4 o’clock – we were already in a really bad situation.
No, no – I will say, personally, I had heard that the number went up, but per se, going up to three-to-five inches was not going to be a major weather event. We go through three-to-five inch storms all of the time. It was my own personal experience – left Gracie Mansion for an event at 6:30 and a few blocks into it, suddenly there’s this crazy traffic on the FDR and there’s no other place to turn. Something obviously was unusual and we all started – I started calling everyone and people started calling each other from their own experiences. But I think it’s really important to note, the thing that I think we would have had a shot at is with the right messaging, very, very quickly, we might have been able to get some people off the road and have a better chance of clearing it. The problem is, even hearing three-to-five inches would not have set off a sense of alarm. You couldn’t have imagined what we saw. If I just said to you, we’re going to have three-to-five inches of snow, you wouldn’t in a million years have pictured what ended up really happening. We’ve had much worse snow and never had something like that. So, this is a tough learning experience because we got something we never would have been able to predict from those numbers. I think the reason we have to do a review is, I’m sure there were some ways to pivot, but I’m trying to be honest with you, I think in essence the die was cast. Could we have gotten better information out, I think so. Could we have made some tactical moves that improved the situation, I think so. Could we have changed the basics? Not that late is my fear.
Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Sure, so I’ll do both. So we did have a number of children last night that were on bus routes that were delayed. Some were delayed from one-two hours. There were a good number that were delayed from anywhere from two-five hours. The last student this morning, with the help of NYPD, because the bus was stuck, got home at about 3:00 am. So, it is absolutely not the circumstances we want for our children. But I do want to say this – our first priority is to make sure that children will be safe and yesterday every student got home safely. We had no incidents of students being injured. So for us we’re very grateful for that. We had extraordinary work that was done by our bus drivers yesterday. Bus drivers that sat with children waiting for their parents who were also stuck in the same traffic to come pick up the students. We had students that were coming back from a college visit in Pennsylvania that were stuck, because they couldn’t get into the city. We had teachers and administrators and school support personnel that stayed with students. We had teachers and support personnel stay overnight in some of our school. Some of them because they couldn’t get home because the roads weren’t passible and some of them because they stayed there so late with children that they wanted to make sure that everybody was okay. So this was a cascading event. We don’t want that. It was a perfect storm as the Mayor has mentioned. It hit right when those buses started to roll taking kids home.
