Jackson Heights Life

First time ever that I know of the plows not continuously riding around, and we certainly have paid the price.

According to the National Weather Service (via Katie Honan at DNAinfo), Jackson Heights got 34 inches of snow, the highest reported total in the region.   It doesn't look like that much to my untrained eye, but it sure is a lot of snow!

The current administration directed scores of additional plow trucks, front-end loaders and V-shaped plows to help clear those smaller Queens byways where the sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, said roughly 70 plows became stuck during the storm. On one street in Jackson Heights, a plow-equipped garbage truck sat at a nearly 45-degree angle across the roadway for much of Sunday, as a weary sanitation worker worked to shovel it out.

“It’s an incredible amount of snow to have to move,” Ms. Garcia said. “Even some of the V-plows are struggling with these depths.”

After the snow is cleared from the streets, she added, the department would do an assessment to determine why its trucks seemed to have more issues in parts of Queens than elsewhere in the city, which saw smaller pockets of snow-choked streets. “We need to go back and see what we could have done better,” she said.

Still, on Sunday, some Queens residents and officials fumed, posting pictures to social media of uncleared streets. The city’s public advocate, Letitia James, called for a delayed opening for schools.

“Our roads are not clear,” Councilman Eric Ulrich, a Republican whose district includes south Queens, said in a phone interview on Sunday night. “How the mayor expects anyone to get to school or work is beyond me.”

“We’re very unhappy,” said Councilman Rory Lancman, a Democrat from eastern Queens. “Most of the streets hadn’t been touched in a long time.”