There are 39 comments.

1. Contributor
   Seawriter

   @Seawriter

   7:38 AM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   Nick H (View Comment):

   I’m game. We should do it during a winter storm warning here, because everyone else will be at the grocery store buying all the bread and milk.

   French toast – the official food of blizzards.

2. Coolidge
   Nick H

   @NickH

   7:47 AM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   Seawriter (View Comment):

   Nick H (View Comment):

   I’m game. We should do it during a winter storm warning here, because everyone else will be at the grocery store buying all the bread and milk.

   French toast – the official food of blizzards.

   My wife and I have started making french toast every time it snows, just because. It seemed like the thing to do.

3. Contributor
   Seawriter

   @Seawriter

   7:52 AM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   Nick H (View Comment):

   Seawriter (View Comment):

   Nick H (View Comment):

   I’m game. We should do it during a winter storm warning here, because everyone else will be at the grocery store buying all the bread and milk.

   French toast – the official food of blizzards.

   My wife and I have started making french toast every time it snows, just because. It seemed like the thing to do.

   Beats hurricane food – everything in your now-defrosting freezer cooked on your backyard gas grill because you have to do something with it before it hits room temperature (in a Houston summer) for five hours.

4. Member
   Ekosj

   @Ekosj

   Post author

   8:04 AM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   Chris Campion (View Comment):

   Ekosj (View Comment):

   DrewInWisconsin (View Comment):

   Didn’t this happen frequently last year?

   I would think clearing the streets would be one of the most basic things a city would do on behalf of its taxpaying citizens.

   You would think.

   A coupl’a years ago, Spartacus left Newark NJ just impassable for days after a heavy snow. It seems that to close a budget gap, Spartacus sold the snowplows. (It’s hard to run for Senate when the city you run has a million dollar budget deficit ). No, really. He did that.

   He then hired private contractors to plow Newark’s streets. But the contracts didn’t stipulate when they had to plow. So when faced with the choice of plowing the local mall who was paying cash on the barrelhead to plow the parking lot right now vs plowing Newark streets whenever … the contractors pushed Newark to the back of the line. Newark was literally closed for almost a week. That is the level of Spartacus’ management acumen.

   I’m just wondering, now, how many people in his administration, and works departments were telling him “No! No!” when he sold the trucks. I’m guessing dozens of people were incredulous. Maybe hundreds. Did it anyway.

   To be fair, he actually privatized the sanitation department – who was responsible for plowing. Now I have no problem with privatising government.   But what the episode shows is that he has no idea whatsoever how private business works.   Zero.   

   And the funny part is that he did it in his last year as mayor so that Newark has a balanced budget when he ran for Senate.   Spartacus, frugal steward, hero of small government.    Then the chickens came home to roost his first year as Senator and the new mayor saddled with the fallout.  

5. Inactive
   Jon1979

   @Jon1979

   9:17 AM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   After the Christmas 2010 blizzard in NYC, new Gov. Cuomo decided that in the event of future major storms, the state would simply advise everyone to just shut things down completely …. because if they did that, the politicians couldn’t be blamed for people getting stuck in the snow.

   That’s led to some embarrassing Defcon 1 shutdowns of area highways and mass transit, only to see the forecast 10-12 inch snow turn into a 3-4 inch total. This was the opposite, where the mess was caused in part because there’s no intermediate responses to winter storms as there were in the past — they’re either not a problem to make preparations for (including on the city level, with Sanitation Department trucks being snowplow and salt equipped before the storm hits, in order to be mobilized from the outset), or they’re snowmageddon, where everything should be shut down for 24-48 hours because if nobody’s going out, no one can blame their elected officials for getting stuck when they went out.

6. Member
   Full Size Tabby

   @FullSizeTabby

   2:29 PM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   Misthiocracy, Joke Pending (View Comment):

   I’d need to see some data on how previous administrations have managed snowfalls of similar severity before passing judgement.

   If a city infrequently receives severe snowstorms, it can make sense to accept the costs of lost productivity rather than incurring the costs of increased snow removal infrastructure.

   Snow removal is expensive. It’s one of the top budget items for cities like Montreal and Ottawa (two cities that have some of the best snow removal operations on Earth). But these cities get heavy snow throughout the winter, every winter.

   If you don’t get relatively constant snowfall over every winter season it means all that snow removal equipment and staff will be sitting idle most of the time.

   This is why Toronto, like NYC, occasionally gets “shut down” by snow. Thanks to Toronto’s unique geography they only get heavy snow once in a while (the wind usually blows it across Lake Ontario and dumps it on Rochester NY instead). As such, they don’t spend nearly as much on snow removal and when the occasional big storm does hit Toronto the rest of the country makes fun of them for being so uncanadian.

   Having just moved away from the Rochester NY area, I can confirm that the region has quite good snow removal, because snow removal is done a lot. 

   In partial defense of government when problems do arise, the time of day that a city receives snow can be an issue. You want your storm to arrive between late evening and very early morning, so that you can plow everything while most people are asleep and there’s no traffic on the roads. If a storm moves in during the early afternoon just as schools are letting out, and afternoon errand-runners are out, it can be a mess because traffic gets in the way of snow clearing. If businesses start closing early and sending people home just as the storm is arriving, the problem gets worse.

   It sounds like the storm hit NYC in the early afternoon, so it could have been an almost-impossible-to-manage problem from the get-go.

7. Inactive
   Randy Webster

   @RandyWebster

   2:36 PM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   I worked in Rochester several years ago building a Ruby Tuesday spinoff (the seafood one).  After cleaning the snow off my car for the fourth time one day, I decided to get an I Love NY bumper sticker.

8. Inactive
   Jon1979

   @Jon1979

   3:21 PM EST ⋅ Nov 18, 2018

   Full Size Tabby (View Comment):

    

   Having just moved away from the Rochester NY area, I can confirm that the region has quite good snow removal, because snow removal is done a lot.

   In partial defense of government when problems do arise, the time of day that a city receives snow can be an issue. You want your storm to arrive between late evening and very early morning, so that you can plow everything while most people are asleep and there’s no traffic on the roads. If a storm moves in during the early afternoon just as schools are letting out, and afternoon errand-runners are out, it can be a mess because traffic gets in the way of snow clearing. If businesses start closing early and sending people home just as the storm is arriving, the problem gets worse.

   It sounds like the storm hit NYC in the early afternoon, so it could have been an almost-impossible-to-manage problem from the get-go.

   I went to Syracuse, and in four years there Interstate 81 and I-90 never shut down for any length of time due to snow going south or east of the city. West on 90 and north on 81 they had shutdowns due to lake effect snow, because Lake Ontario’s so deep it almost never freezes over . So the areas closest to the lake or going up into the Adirondacks would get hammered (poor Old Forge got 402 inches of snow one year), but in the other direction the cities and the state would have their plows and salters out at the first sign of trouble and would make sure the main roads stayed open to traffic.

    

9. Inactive
   Matthew Singer

   @MatthewSinger

   4:30 AM EST ⋅ Nov 20, 2018

   JudithannCampbell (View Comment):

   We were in D.C. once for the March for Life, and the entire city went into panic and shut down over 1 inch of snow; I am never clear on how much of this is being unused to snow and how much is government incompetence. Here in Massachusetts, the government subs out much or most of the cleanup to private contractors: every other guy with a truck has a snowplow attached to it in winter, and they make good money helping with the cleanup. But we get a lot of snow; it isn’t worth it to invest in a plow for your truck if you live in an area that doesn’t get a lot of snow.

   As Marion Barry said… What G-d giveth, G-d taketh away.