Greets and saluts from the NYC metro area, which is still largely digging itself out from under the blizzard of mistakes by Mayor Bloomberg, his top staffers, and MTA officials, who made a bad situation far worse by refusing to announce a snow emergency or take necessary precautions to keep the mass transit system from failing completely.

I had to travel into Brooklyn on personal business yesterday and I was absolutely appalled with the state of the roads there. I had lived in Brooklyn for 20 years, and am regularly in Brooklyn to see friends and family, and have never seen snow emergency routes clogged with so much snow and abandoned vehicles as I saw.

Ocean Parkway was the epitome of what went wrong. It’s a snow emergency route (that if a snow emergency is declared, only vehicles with tire chains or snow tires are permitted to drive - allowing sanitation crews the ability to plow and to speed emergency response to those that might need it).

Instead of being clear - vast stretches had hundreds of abandoned cars blocking lanes, tying up traffic and delaying emergency responses. People would see that the cross streets (some of them are themselves snow emergency routes) were in horrific shape, and caused further traffic issues. This is completely unacceptable and represented a health and safety emergency because emergency crews continue to be delayed in response times to help those who call 911 with emergencies.

The singular decision to not call a snow emergency at the outset of the storm - when the NWS was already calling a blizzard warning was a huge mistake - and heads should roll - particularly the Transportation Commissioner who thought the situation didn’t call for one.

Add on to that the reports that the Sanitation workers were engaging in a work action by not adequately plowing their areas of responsibility because of budget cuts and workforce cuts, and it was a perfect storm of disastrous government responses for what is ordinarily a solid city response to storms.