New York in a Stormy Crisis

Leading up to Christmas, we wondered if we would see any snow. It had not yet snowed since we have lived here and we were informed that it was extremely abnormal. Late in the day on Christmas as we walked on the Brooklyn Bridge, we heard the news that a storm was rolling in that would pack between eight to sixteen inches of snow. We went to bed expecting to wake up to a wintry scene.

The predictions were off as the storm didn't start dumping until around nine in the morning on Sunday the 26th. It started slow with a forecast of steady snow for the next twenty-four hours. This was the scene outside our apartment in the afternoon on Sunday.



All day and all night it snowed. The howling winds blew snow around and this was the scene around eight in the morning on the 27th. Notice how the cars in the driveway have no snow while the one across the street is almost completely covered. By the end of the storm, twenty-four inches fell in our area of Brooklyn.



A close-up of the tall task awaiting the owner of this car when it comes time to move it.



Slowly the Mexicans began filtering into the neighborhood charging $50 per driveway to begin moving the snow around.



This was the scene later in the afternoon after many driveways had been cleaned and a tractor drove down the block flattening the snow in the middle of the road. Even with that effort, the street was not passable.



View in other direction toward our car.



The next day we headed to Manhattan to meet up with some friends that came to town for the Pinstripe Bowl. Before we began our journey, we surveyed our car.



It had been twenty-four hours since the storm quit. We walked through the mounds of snow to get to a bus, but all we found was one stuck a few blocks from our house. To make it to Manhattan, we knew we had to walk and sloshed our way through snow and slushy melting snow. Before we made it on the train, our feet were soaked. But we were happy to find out that the train nearest our home was running, albeit on a delayed schedule.

We met with friends in Manhattan and noticed that the snow was disappearing fast from that borough. We found out that they were trucking the snow out, especially in the tourist areas. There were reports that ambulances could not get through to help people in the other boroughs, however. All over the city tempers flared and the mayor was blamed by many. On Wednesday, we headed back to Manhattan and not one car on our block was able get out. But a path was dug to a famous tourist attraction.



Two days later on New Year's Eve, the street was still packed. It would be the first day the temperature hit the forty degree mark. Hopefully, that would aid in the melting process.



Our car was still boxed in by the plow...



And someone's snow blower.



After watching news shows and talking to residents, they said that this was the worst they had ever seen it in regards to the clean-up effort. New Yorkers have a flair for the dramatic, but I sensed many were right. It's hard to imagine pleasing everyone when most places received over twenty inches of snow, but when it took three days to get bus service running for people who could not get cars out, that pleased almost nobody.

We finally dug our car out on January 1st.