City Hall dithered, storm victims shivered — and so Mike Bloomberg’s main man was compelled to scurry off into the dark last night to try to make things right.
As best he could.
Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson was patrolling Central Park after sunset, searching out space heaters, bottled water and such — and, with Post City Hall Bureau Chief David Seifman standing witness, loading what he found into a city-owned SUV for transport to Staten Island.
Wolfson had pledged Friday afternoon, while emotively announcing the cancelation of the New York City Marathon, that “all of the assets that this marathon currently has — generators, other equipment, food, water — will be redeployed to people who need it.”
As if.
Precious little, if any of it, got anywhere near the hardest-hit victims of Superstorm Sandy.
Certainly not the generators.
A dozen were sitting idly in Central Park as late as yesterday, while out at the marathon’s Staten Island starting line on Sunday, The Post found 20 heaters, tens of thousands of “space” blankets, jackets and crates of water, apples and peanuts, all sorely needed by freezing residents of the Rockaways, Staten Island and Coney Island.
This was at the same time that Mayor Bloomberg was terming the tale of the idle generators to be “not a story.”
How wrong can one mayor be?
It was The Post’s embarrassing front-page photo of two generators being used to power a media tent that left organizers no choice but grudgingly to cancel the race.
Thus was Wolfson piloting his SUV through heavy traffic to Staten Island last night — his conscience clearly burdened (or, more likely, his rear end on the line) after his cavernously empty “all assets” pledge.
What about that promise?
“Obviously, that was my expectation at the time,” he declared yesterday — adding, “It is unfair and unrealistic to expect [race organizers] to turn over generators they don’t own.”
Weasel words from Wolfson.
He knows that the city has enormous influence over the New York Road Runners club — and a timely flick of the Bloomberg wrist would’ve produced instant agreement on redeployment of the 41 generators then under rental to the organization.
Was the wrist flicked?
Obviously not.
And so on Staten Island, the Rockaways and at Breezy Point, people grew very cold, very hungry — and very, very impatient.
The mayor got a taste of that when he made an unannounced visit to the Rockaways, where residents lack clean water and other basic supplies.
“When are we going to get some help?” pleaded one woman — so enraged that she had to be restrained by the mayor’s security detail.
Good question.
True enough, much of the city has returned to something resembling normal.
But not all of it.
Not the part most grievously injured — not the part that needed help the most, not the folks who would have benefited from the ice-cold idle generators that Howard Wolfson so emptily promised, and whose shameful absence Mike Bloomberg considers to be “not a story.”
A full accounting is yet to come.