A top Erie County official admitted Tuesday that authorities could have “absolutely’’ done a greater job handling the upstate weekend blizzard that left a minimum of 33 people dead.
Critics have battered officials over all the things from issuing a travel ban just 41 minutes before it took effect Friday — leaving many motorists trapped on the road because the deadly conditions quickly grew worse — to failing to call within the National Guard soon enough.
Authorities have fired back that the superstorm and the killer chaos it wreaked were effectively an act of God.
“After we were told that we were going to have a generational storm, after we heard terms equivalent to bomb cyclone, that is something that we’re used to in western Latest York, in Buffalo and Erie County,’’ Sheriff John Garcia told reporters Tuesday.
“But I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said, noting the “zero visibility’’ that kept many emergency crews off the road throughout the height of “the blizzard of the century.”
On Saturday, as much as two-thirds of the county’s emergency vehicles were still useless, including due to issues equivalent to abandoned and stalled cars clogging the streets, Dem County Executive Mark Poloncarz said on the time.
“We planned,’’ Garcia insisted Tuesday, echoing officials from Hochul on down.
“But we never thought that it was going to be as bad because it was,’’ he acknowledged. “So do we’ve got to recuperate? Absolutely. Higher equipment, more equipment.’’
But some critics have hammered the county over a basic issue they are saying was in authorities’ control — when to issue a travel ban.
Eric County didn’t institute the ban till 9:30 a.m. Friday, after days of warnings about impending wicked weather — and because the storm began swiftly moving into the realm with hurricane-level winds.
The county gave travelers a warning that the ban was being instituted — but just 41 minutes ahead of time, at 8:49 a.m. Friday, when many individuals were on the road already ahead of the Christmas holiday weekend.
The region’s staggering death toll includes a minimum of several individuals who died of their cars, equivalent to 22-year-old Anndel Taylor, who became trapped leaving her shift at a Buffalo hospital Friday.
Taylor was discovered dead in her automotive on a road the subsequent day, possibly dying from carbon monoxide poisoning as she tried to maintain warm while waiting for an emergency crew to rescue her, her mother said.
Poloncarz insisted to The Post on Tuesday, “I believe the preparation [for the storm] was good.
“The issue was once the blizzard hit in earnest, which is around noon on Friday,” he said.
“We talked concerning the expected arrival on Thursday, which originally was around 10 a.m. [Friday]. It came sooner,’’ the pol said.
“It modified over from rain to sleet to snow in a really short time frame around 8:30 within the morning [Friday]. After which it really began to hit completely in earnest around 11:30, noon.
“As soon because it became apparent that we were going to need to issue the driving ban, we did,’’ he said.
He said he has virtually no power over non-essential businesses that selected to stay open, effectively encouraging staff and customers to still come out on the roads.
“Thursday, I advisable to all private businesses to shut for the subsequent day. … I can’t organize them to shut unless I declare principally the equivalent of martial law,” Poloncarz said.
“So at this point, we were in a situation where we made the recommendations.”
Poloncarz and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown have raged against rogue drivers who flout the travel ban, saying they divert precious resources once they crash or get stuck and call for help or just abandon their vehicles, creating roadblocks for emergency crews.
The scofflaws are so bad that Poloncarz finally announced Tuesday that 100 National Guard Military Police were being stationed around Buffalo’s city limits and at its major intersections to discourage them.
“We tried to implement the driving ban, but people have continually ignored it,’’ the county exec told The Post. “It just bothers me to no end.”
Buffalo cops Tuesday were still working their way through 1,000 emergency calls, some from way back to Friday night, Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said, in response to the Buffalo News.
He said the department’s computer system was groaning under the load and that the cops’ Ford Explorer SUVS hadn’t been in a position to handle the call-outs, given the driving conditions.
“We were shut down,” he said of the department throughout the storm. “It was absolute gridlock, snowed in, and we couldn’t drive anymore. It was demoralizing.”
Looters have been making the most of the situation and ransacked some stores as officers remained stymied, officials have said.
Gramaglia said Tuesday that the department has established an “anti-looting detail” to specifically prevent such crimes, the News said.
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has taken heat for not sending other National Guardsmen to the region till Saturday.
She touted the deployment of a litany of resources before and throughout the storm, including Dec. 22 when she announced that the state was moving snow plows, snow blowers and other vehicles headed to western Latest York before snow began falling.
But such vehicles couldn’t reach the scores of stranded motorists including Taylor.
With local media reporting wheeled vehicles getting stuck, winter sports enthusiasts sprung into motion by driving their snowmobiles and snowcats – tracked vehicles able to traveling in virtually any frigid condition – wherever they were needed.
“There was a state trooper that was stuck in his automotive. There have been two off-duty state troopers attempting to get to work that got stuck in the identical intersection,” Richard McNamara, treasurer of the local Northern Erie Sno-Seekers, recalled to The Post.
Jackie Bray, the commissioner of the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, told The Post on Tuesday that deploying National Guard members to the realm any earlier wouldn’t have made any sense, given the disaster work they’d find yourself doing.
“This storm, this duration of conditions that didn’t allow emergency services and emergency response, was unprecedented, and there is no such thing as a amount of additional equipment or additional personnel that may have modified that,” she said.
“The National Guard’s core missions have been to move medical personnel to hospitals. It’s been to distribute [military rations] and water to first responders. It’s been to help with fatality management, and it’s been to help with search and rescue. All of those missions couldn’t be energetic from Friday night through a lot of the day on Saturday.”
Still, upstate Monroe County legislator Rachel Barnhart, a Democrat, tweeted Tuesday of the storm chaos, “Was this inevitable or was there a failure in communicating and preparing?
“I hope there’s a deep evaluation post-recovery,’’ she wrote.
State Assemblyman David DiPietro (R-East Aurora) told The Post, “I believe the governor and the federal government in western Latest York in Buffalo, Erie County, dropped the ball.
“In a nutshell, I believe the governor and the bulk within the state government were more anxious last week about getting their pay raise than concerning the storm, which everyone had been predicting for nearly per week,” DiPietro said — referring to the special legislative session called by state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie over the pols’ salary hikes.
“The National Guard must have been called out quicker. There must have been more crews here.
“People must have been told to not drive [sooner]. [Officials] must have closed [streets], a little bit quicker getting people off the streets. For whatever reason, it didn’t occur.”
