A scathing report on the city’s response to last year’s crippling blizzard says four Sanitation workers bought beer at a Brooklyn deli after their trucks got stuck under piles of snow on Dec. 27, 2010, as The Post reported exclusively.
The finding was one of several troubling incidents uncovered by the city’s Department of Investigation from the colossal Dec. 26 storm that crippled the city and sparked cries of a slowdown.
Surveillance tape investigators recovered from the Ocean Mini Mart at 3917 18th Avenue in Kensington shows two workers in green Sanitation uniforms purchasing a six-pack of Corona beer at about 9:35 p.m., a block from where a bus and three plows were stuck, says a report from the city Department of Investigation obtained by The Post.
DOI investigators grilled the four, one of whom admitted that he and two others bought the beer and returned to their vehicle to drink it. A fourth member of the crew also purchased and drank beer, according to the report. It does not identify the workers.
“As the Mayor said this winter, the response to this storm did not meet our standards, or the standards that New Yorkers have come to expect from us,” Mayor Bloomberg’s spokeswoman Julie Wood said today. “Since then, we have undertaken a thorough review of what went wrong and how we can fix it.”
“Many of the DOI report’s recommendations mirror those that were included in the January report from the Mayor’s Office of Operations and the Office of Citywide Emergency Communications. The Department of Sanitation is actively working to implement the recommendations in both reports and will improve many of their procedures to ensure that snow removal operations function well in the future, as they have in many other storms.”
The report on the giant Dec. 26 storm, which has been sent to the Sanitation Department, the Brooklyn and Queens District Attorneys and the US Attorney in Brooklyn, claimed there was no clear evidence of a slowdown but highlighted several shocking examples of “The Strongest” slacking off and screwing up.
– Three Sanitation trucks got stuck outside a Dunkin’ Donuts on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn and weren’t freed for 27 hours. When workers tried to dig out, they didn’t have enough shovels, and some of them broke. Drivers kept the vehicles idling until they ran out of gas.
– The department did not have nearly enough chains for its vehicles, and 3,760 sets of chains broke.
– One DSNY worker — captured in a Post photo dozing in his plow — was sent to clear the Whitestone and Van Wyck Expressways. He stopped for coffee on Front Street near 149th Street and got stuck for seven hours. He told investigators that he had only one set of chains, instead of the customary two, and that in his 11 years on the job he had never seen so many trucks go out with only one set.
– Sanitation bosses issued a “cease salt” order at 7 p.m. on Dec. 26 because they believed salting the streets had become ineffective and the salt was being wasted. But workers on the streets “expressed frustration at this order because they believed salting earlier in the storm would have had a positive impact.”
– Many drivers were stuck in their vehicles for up to 12 hours — a public relations nightmare, the report says. Being “stranded that long in the blizzard led to situations ranging from the need for DSNY personnel to get a warm cup of coffee or use a restroom, to city employees falling asleep in their trucks, and worse, to drinking alcohol in their stuck trucks.”
– Cameras captured images of 265 trucks in action in Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island from the start of the storm. Of those, 30 were seen with their plows in an upright position — meaning not able to scrape away snow. With 25 vehicles, there was a reason — no snow had accumulated or they were going to or coming from a garage. But five “cannot be explained,” it said. Three trucks remained stationary for “reasons not apparent.”
– The Sanitation Department’s policy of making sure one worker stays with each stuck vehicle meant countless drivers were rendered useless because there were multiple stranded plows in several locations, all of which could have been watched by one person.