De Blasio: I Was Frozen Out Of Decision To Shut Down Subways

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said today that his administration was frozen out of the decision by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the MTA to shut the city’s subways.

“We found out just as it was being announced,” de Blasio told reporters. “We did not get a lot of advance notice.”

He defended authorities’ handling of the expected massive snowstorm – including shutting down all roads, schools and mass transit hours before the predicted blizzard – insisting that New Yorkers merely “got lucky” when the accumulation barely topped 6 inches.

“Would you rather be ahead of the action or behind? Would you rather be prepared or unprepared?” he said.

“We had consistently reports talking about 2 feet of snow. To me, it was a no-brainer. We had to take precautions to keep people safe. God forbid, this storm had not ultimately moved 20 to 30 miles to the east.

“I think based on the information we all had, it was right to take extraordinary precautions. … You can’t be a Monday morning quarterback on something like weather.”

De Blasio said he had in the back of his mind the city’s screw-up in 2010, in which it didn’t react quickly enough to a storm, with disastrous results.

“2010 was clearly in my thoughts because that was a case in which the city was not prepared sufficiently,” the mayor said.

Still, he added, “I’m sure there will be a full review to see what we can learn from this.”

“In the vast majority of the city, we did not even hit 10 inches. Six, 7, 8 inches has been more typical in parts of the city. Put simply, we got half as much as what predictions had been or even under half as much.

“We obviously missed the worst of this storm, which is a blessing.

“The bottom line is, we got lucky. Things turned out a lot better than we feared, but we were prepared.”

The mayor said the city’s schools would be open Wednesday.

Mass transit was on mainly a Sunday schedule, officials said.

The powerful nor’easter, which was forecast to dump loads of snow overnight Monday into Tuesday, instead “grazed” New York City.

“This was a very expensive exercise,” Cuomo said during a morning press conference Tuesday. “The predictions that we acted on, obviously in this region, there was less snow than anticipated. But because the roads were empty, the system will come back online much faster than it would have.”

“I’ve seen the consequences the other way, and it gets very frightening very quickly,” the governor added. “We have people die in storms. I’d much rather be in a situation where we say we got lucky than saying we didn’t get lucky and somebody dying.”

Subway and bus service got rolling again at 9 a.m., officials said, with full Sunday-level service restored by noon.

Read more at the New York Post.

{Matzav.com Newscenter}