Citizens Seek Missing Mayor: APB On Bloomberg After Ferry Crash

Last weekend, Mike Bloomberg waited until the show was over at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington before heading back to town to check into an attempted car bombing on the most crowded street in his city.

This weekend, all City Hall will say is that the mayor is "monitoring" the ferry crash that sent more than three dozen to the hospital yesterday morning from some undisclosed location. "The mayor is monitoring the city response," spokesman Jason Post told the Daily News's Adam Lisberg yesterday afternoon.

Post added that the mayor also didn't travel to the scene last July when another ferry crash injured New Yorkers. Lisberg surmises that Bloomberg, who was last seen late Friday morning at a police memorial ceremony, may have skipped out of town to get an early start on a scheduled trip to London and then on to Berlin this week. This seems a reasonable explanation, since New York's wealthiest citizen holds a $7-million, 100-year lease on a luxurious rowhouse in Cadogan Square in London that he may well want to enjoy.

Actually, even from afar, the mayor's influence is clearly being felt: His team is insisting that what happened when the Andrew J. Barbieri failed to slow down as it pulled into the pier at Staten Island at 9:45 a.m. was a "hard landing" as opposed to a "crash." This is the same terminology Team Bloomberg employed last year when a ferry lost power upon docking in St. George and smashed into the pier, sending a dozen to the hospital. A "crash" apparently is only when fatalities result, as happened also on Bloomberg's watch back in 2003, when 11 people were killed after the captain of the Barbieri collapsed at the helm.