Metro

Council’s snow-probe grilling spree begins

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The City Council — which has been buried under an avalanche of horror stories about the post-Christmas blizzard — begins “the mother of all hearings” today, with four top officials testifying about the fiasco.

Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, in charge of the Sanitation Department; Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty; Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano; Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph Bruno; and a top official of the NYPD will discuss how their agencies reacted to the disaster.

One anecdote from a Queens resident is typical of the reports council members have been collecting.

Stephen Cooper saw a garbage truck stuck in the snow with three front-end loaders surrounding it and a separate van nearby in his Queens neighborhood. Each vehicle contained at least one worker.

He chatted with the workers around 3 p.m. the Monday of the storm and was told the garbage truck had been trapped for 11 hours.

He returned about an hour later to find the truck and one front-end loader in the same spot, while the other two loaders were parked in front of a pizza shop down the street. The drivers, he said, were inside their trucks sipping coffee, and the van was gone.

Meanwhile, surrounding streets were covered in snow more than 12 hours after the blizzard had subsided.

“That was what was bothering me about it — if instead of just waiting there they had taken those front-end loaders they could’ve done all the side streets,” Cooper said.

The council turned over Cooper’s account to the Department of Investigation — one of four agencies probing allegations of an intentional slowdown among individual sanitation workers upset over Mayor Bloomberg’s recent budget cuts and demotions.

The snow-covered streets caused at least three deaths because ambulances got stuck, according to the victims’ families.

The sessions — which will take place in every borough — are being held by four committees including Sanitation. The Sanitation committee’s chairwoman, Letitia James (D-Brooklyn), predicted it will be “the mother of all hearings.”

Quinn’s office has provided Bloomberg with a host of questions she wants answered, including how much notice the city had of the pending storm.

The Sanitation Supervisors Union will not testify, on the advice of its lawyers.

Additional reporting by Ginger Adams Otis

sgoldenberg@nypost.com