Give Them a Shovel: Morning-After Pols Throwing Snow Balls

By Tom Robbins Tue., Dec. 28 2010 at 10:28 AM

Categories: Featured, Snow News Day, Tom Robbins

Disasters always have to be someone else's fault, so we are a city of finger-pointers this morning. We have hapless Brooklyn state senator Carl Kruger, who only tried to shut down state government last year, being quoted on national radio complaining about the unplowed streets of his Mill Basin district. Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. is on Facebook condemning the mayor for urging New Yorkers to carry on. Bloggers are peering out warm apartment windows to condemn city workers trying to dig our way of this mess. If they would all just go dig out a couple of crosswalks, we'd be out of this jam a lot faster.

Not that there aren't big serious problems. Emergency Medical Technicians union chief Pat Bahnken (one of those shiftless city workers) reports that more than 100 ambulances became stuck in the snow. Paramedics, he tells the Post's Larry Celona, were so overwhelmed they were given a time limit on giving CPR to patients. Fire Department officials say the backlog of emergency calls hit 1300 late yesterday. Fire trucks took a 14-minute lifetime to reach a five-alarm fire in Queens. A pregnant woman in Brooklyn's Dyker Heights waited five hours for an ambulance. Firefighters finally got there at 1:30 A.M. Monday, then carried her on a stretcher through the streets where they flagged down an emergency vehicle which got her to a hospital in time to deliver her baby.

Veteran sanitation commissioner John Doherty himself got stuck in the snow -- at 4 A.M.(!) -- while inspecting those Brooklyn streets that Kruger is complaining about.

Email to Friend