December 27, 2010 Choreographing a Snowplow Ballet, to Mixed Reviews
(Again) By RUSS BUETTNER In the city’s plan, it is envisioned as
something like a ballet of behemoths, with a fleet of more than 2,000
garbage trucks swooping through the streets, brushing aside tons of
snow as quickly as possible. But like most things in New York, each
snowstorm brings a flurry of disagreement over how well that production
has come off.

The blizzard that covered the city Sunday and Monday was no
exception. Even before the high winds and snow ended Monday morning,
cries of neglect could be heard across the five boroughs.

“They don’t care about Brooklyn, man,” said Tito Ernest, 32, who
was trying to dig out a black Honda Accord stuck in the middle of the
intersection of Rutland Road and Rockaway Parkway. “They had every
chance to come out here to plow since last night.”

The city’ s sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, who oversees snow
removal efforts, said he understood people’s frustration, but he asked
for cooperation, patience and a little historical perspective. Mr. Doherty
said that in 1996 it took the city 34 hours to clear the streets after
a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow, roughly the same amount that had
fallen by Monday afternoon.

“I would like to reduce that time if I could,” he said. “I’ll
have to see how successful I’ll be.”

Despite the complaints of favoritism, city officials said their plan of
attack for clearing snow had nothing to do with geographic preferences
— say, plowing certain boroughs or neighborhoods before others —
and everything to do with the type of street.

The plan divides roadways into three major categories: arterial,
secondary and tertiary. Arterial streets are the main thoroughfares,
which are typically bus routes and are cleared first. The next focus is
secondary streets, which are generally the straight roadways that feed
into arterial streets. Tertiary roads, the narrow and sometimes curved
residential streets that feed into secondary streets, are the last to
be plowed.

That means that much of Manhattan, with its concentration of arterial
streets, gets quicker attention.

Within each of those three categories, roadways are assigned numeric
values, which are used both to set priorities and to assign routes. Those
determinations are made and reviewed each year by the commanders in each
of 59 sanitation districts, or commands, which match the boundaries of
community boards.

As a storm approaches, the first line of attack is a pre-emptive strike
by 365 spreaders, each holding as much as 16 tons of salt. On Sunday,
they were deployed before the snow began falling.

Once the snowfall totals two inches, about 1,700 city garbage trucks
fitted with plows hit the streets.

Mr. Doherty said those plows could often move on to secondary streets
as the snow fell, but the snowfall and drifts in this blizzard kept the
trucks on the arterial roadways well into Monday morning. Plows were
also hindered by abandoned cars stuck in the middle of secondary streets,
and in a few cases plow operators could not see those obstacles through
the darkness and blowing snow until they, too, were stuck.

Further, the department must typically replow where car owners have
shoveled snow back into the streets.

Mr. Doherty said the secondary streets, which he anticipated being
cleared Monday night and Tuesday, presented special difficulties with
this much snow: It can be too much for even a 20-ton garbage truck,
so front-end loaders must pick it up and move it.

“If you go in there with one of our collection trucks, if you are not
careful, you will get bogged down,” he said. “As strong as it is,
they cannot push that much snow out of the way.”

The Sanitation Department also looks beyond its own equipment and
workforce, hiring as many as 900 day laborers to shovel bus stops and
sidewalks. And private operators of heavy equipment like front-end
loaders and dump trucks are hired to help out.

Mr. Doherty said that outside operators had been a component of the
city’s plan for decades, but that their response for this storm had
been low.

It typically takes 36 hours to make a pass through all of the smaller
roads, said Vito A. Turso, a Sanitation Department spokesman.

That timeline would beat a 1994 snow plan by the Giuliani administration,
which estimated that 16 inches of fresh snow would take three to six
days to clear from tertiary streets.

Snow removal has been laced with political overtones since 1969, when
an outcry from Queens over the pace of street clearing after a blizzard
knocked the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay on its heels. In
1996, Howard Golden, then the Brooklyn borough president, accused Mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani of devoting more resources to Staten Island, which
had been important to Mr. Giuliani’s election.

On Monday, Peter F. Vallone Jr., a City Council member who represents
Astoria, Queens, said his neighborhood was being treated poorly.

“The only plow I saw all day was the one that crashed into the corner
near my house,” said Mr. Vallone, who added that the Council’s public
safety committee, which he leads, would hold a hearing on the city’s
handling of the storm.

“We need an explanation,” Mr. Vallone said. “Is it budget cuts? Is
it a lack of planning? What caused this storm to be different from every
other one we’ve lived through?”

Mr. Doherty said the cutbacks that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had
ordered in the Sanitation Department’s budget had not hurt the city’s
response. And he laughed off a question about whether political concerns
played a role in setting road-clearing priorities.

“No,” Mr. Doherty said. “Because if you play politics, you get
fired very quickly. You have to do your job, and you have to treat
everybody the same.”