NYC snow problems were no accident

By now you’ve probably read numerous reports about snow-jammed streets in New York City, or heard Mayor Bloomberg’s apology for the awful mess in the city, or watched the video (NSFW language) of NYC workers demolishing a parked SUV while trying to extract a front-end bucket loader stuck in the snow. 

Well guess what?  It wasn’t inefficiency or lack of manpower that caused the problems with citywide snow removal.  According to the New York Post, it was a group of vindictive city sanitation workers:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses
from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the
blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that
turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The
Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as
Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained
treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action,
several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of
demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

The
snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of
retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take
off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a
timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the
reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the
rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics
to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which
included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping
over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The
snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most
streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles
of snow.