The city unveiled its latest weapon in the war on snow yesterday — a team of workers armed with video cams who scour the city for unplowed streets and relay the footage in real time.
But the five “Snow Scouts” who fanned out around the five boroughs on motor scooters and in cars to monitor snow-cleanup efforts were pretty useless yesterday because of the lack of any substantial accumulation.
Using handheld cameras and laptop computers, the scouts are able to stream video images of snowy streets directly to the Mayor’s Office of Operations at City Hall.
Mayor Bloomberg is able to monitor the Scout-sent video on his iPad, a mayoral aide said.
“We’re reacting to the recent storm,” said Carole Post, commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, referring to the Dec. 26-27 blizzard that paralyzed outer-borough streets for days and left residents howling about the Sanitation Department’s anemic response.
Post said the scouts were sent yesterday to “areas of concern from the last storm.”
Another snow-fighting device that debuted yesterday was GPS-equipped cellphones placed in 41 Sanitation Department vehicles, out of the 1,700 vehicles that responded to the snowfall.
In addition to the global-positioning-satellite feature — which allows supervisors to monitor where a particular plow, salt spreader or loader is at any time — the phones also have push-to-talk buttons that let drivers report trouble on the streets.
“If they see something like a stuck car, they can push a button, tell the garage, and the garage will send a tow truck to get that person through,” Bloomberg said.
“In the last big snowstorm, if we’d had more information, perhaps we would have done some things differently,” he said. “If it works, then we’ll expand this thing.”