"The Blizzard - Assigning Blame or Sharing Responsibility"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“The Blizzard – Assigning Blame or Sharing Responsibility”

December 30, 2010

In his 1960 travelogue Travels With Charlie: In Search of America, John Steinbeck speaks to the age-old tendency to pass blame. He writes of an encounter in Minnesota: “’Why, I remember when people took everything out on Mr. Roosevelt. Andy Larsen got red in the face about Roosevelt when his hens got the croup. Yes sir,’ he said with growing enthusiasm, ‘those Russians got quite a load to carry. Man has a fight with his wife, he belts the Russians.’” To which Steinbeck replies: “Maybe everybody needs Russians. I’ll bet even in Russia they need Russians. Maybe they call it Americans.”

The aftermath of Sunday’s storm has politicians, predictably, ducking for cover. The search for a scapegoat is as old as the human race. There have been exceptions. President Truman notably put a sign on his desk: “The Buck Stops Here.” On Monday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in retrospect sounding too nonchalant, said: “This city is going on. It’s a day like every other day.” The city did go on, but it was not a day like every other day. Yesterday, he appeared to accept responsibility, but then added he was “extremely dissatisfied” with the performance of the city’s emergency management system.

Members of the city council have already called for what is another favorite American pastime – a commission to investigate and determine responsibility for the failure to remove all the snow immediately. Mr. Bloomberg appropriately responded with the disdain such a call deserved: Those members, he said, “must not have enough things to do if that’s what they are focusing on.” Assigning personal blame for the cause will be difficult, as Mother Nature does not report to the mayor, the city council or even the president. My prediction: a commission will meet several times; it will issue a lengthy, but meaningless report; it will cost the residents of the city hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it will finally be consigned to the rear of some dusty closet.

Those who work for the city – the people who work for us, the tax payers – should do all that is possible in emergency situations. One of their responsibilities is to listen and heed weather reports. But so should residents and those who drive into the city. I do not know how many cars were abandoned on the streets, but it is in the thousands. Walking to work on Monday, most every side street between 64th and 48th seemed to have at least one abandoned car. The outer “burbs” were in even worse shape. According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, the city has 9419 sanitation workers, who also do snow removal. On Sunday night, 2400 of them were deployed along with 1700 plows, a job made more difficult because of abandoned cars blocking the 6000 miles of streets that encompass the city. On Monday, Mayor Bloomberg said that 1000 cars had been removed, but that could only have been a fraction of those still in place.

The papers and news stations are filled with stories of tragic happenings, of ambulances called that never arrived, of thousands of people stranded in busses, on subways and on airport tarmacs. By 4:00AM on Christmas morning, almost twenty-four hours before the snow began falling, the National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch. By 3:55PM they declared a blizzard warning, but city officials, according to the New York Times, “opted not to declare a snow emergency.” Beginning early Sunday morning, and over a twenty-four period, twenty inches of snow fell on this city of 8,000,000 people. Wind gusts of 50 MPH created drifts and impeded visibility. The storm was more intense than anyone that I know predicted.

However, as we all know, life does go on. New York City, every day, averages 145 deaths and 347 births. There are uncountable accidents and other incidents, requiring emergency services. On a typical day, more than 15,000 calls are made to 911. Tragedies are a daily event. A natural crisis, such as we recently experienced with their accompanying photos and newsreels, makes those tragedies more personal. Perhaps the people of New York would have liked to have seen the mayor adopt the lachrymose characteristics of John Boehner? But I don’t think so.

In the search for blame, we should all look inward – especially those that drove into the city that fateful day, as well as city officials. We should also keep in mind that forecasts are rarely precisely accurate. While it is no excuse, the National Weather Service has, in the past, forecast storms that never arrived, or certainly never arrived with the severity predicted. When that happens, we mock them for frightening people unnecessarily. Remember the story of the boy that cried wolf. Dire predictions that never come true tend to diminish the oracle’s next renderings. I don’t believe that the blizzard requires a commission to know what went wrong – it was mainly a storm bigger than expected.