So Let It Snow: The Strongest Are Ready

The big decisions are made on the couch around 5 a.m.

When it looks like snow, the sanitation commissioner gathers her top chiefs and directors in a cozy office on the eighth floor of an old building on Worth Street near the federal courthouse for their “couch meeting.” They squeeze onto a dark brown leather sofa and, without fail, talk about the weather.

“You’ve got to be able to rock ’n’ roll when the shift starts at 7 a.m.,” said Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who oversees a $1.6 billion budget — $84 million of which typically goes to snow removal. From this couch, the plan for thousands of sanitation workers is put in place. Ms. Garcia also gives her recommendation to the mayor on whether to close schools.

Since 2014, when Ms. Garcia took over the department, major changes have taken place to clear the streets after anything from a dusting to a bomb cyclone. For decades, snow was dealt with in a convoluted system depending on how trafficked an area was. But all that changed in 2010 when a catastrophic blizzard left people in parts of the boroughs stranded for days and shook the department to its core.

Now workers attack the storm through what is called a critical and sector approach, hitting main arteries and then spreading through the rest of the city regardless of whether it’s Manhattan or the furthest reaches of Staten Island. Long before the couch meeting, the planning begins.

“Actually, we start thinking about snow in August,” Ms. Garcia said. In summer, the fleet — consisting of more than 1,500 plows and around 700 salt spreaders and haulsters — is rehabilitated. Routes are examined, checking against any Department of Transportation changes for construction and street closings. Eighty haulsters — the miniature salt spreaders that can fit down narrow streets — were added in 2016.

In October, a mock forecast is made and drills are held, as sanitation workers are trained and retrained on how to attach plows and tire chains. When the snow does actually come, with two or more inches on the ground, the “Drop your plow” order goes out on the radio, and workers are ready to do battle.

The department — like the fire and police departments — is a quasi-military organization, which uses military time, and whose chiefs wear up to four stars on their epaulets. “Whenever there’s remotely a disturbance in the force, we get going,” said Chief Edward Grayson (four stars). Mr. Grayson, like many of the managers in the department, started out on the street as a sanitation worker. In Mr. Grayson’s case, 19 years ago in Jackson Heights.

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Depending on how severe a storm looks to be, decisions have to be made on how many garbage trucks to convert to plows and how many workers to call in. For one 12-hour shift, around 2,300 sanitation workers — known as New York’s Strongest — are on call for snow removal.

“Unless you’re on vacation, you can be ordered to work,” said First Deputy Commissioner Steven Costas, who started as a sanitation worker in the Bronx. “That is the law of the land. When you get this job, you know that coming in.”

For hours before a storm, a half-dozen managers and analysts assemble just down the hall from the office with the couch in what’s known as the GPS room, a Norad-like center with 21 large, colorful tracking screens. Weather feeds, traffic-camera feeds and Bladerunner — a color-coded mapping system that tracks what has and has not been salted and cleared on 6,300 miles of city pavement — are constantly on view. The public can also access a version of the program to see progress in their own neighborhoods.

“We’re eyes in the sky. We look at the big picture,” said Shari Pardini, director of the Operations Management Division who, using technology, helps plan the attack before the first flakes fall.

Ms. Pardini, the first four-star female chief in the department, started as a collector in East New York, Brooklyn, in 1993. Since Ms. Garcia’s tenure, with Ms. Pardini at the controls, the department’s technology has literally taken a front seat. Salt spreaders are guided by the department’s new Magellan system — a small-screen GPS that not only directs them, but informs the command center what streets have already been salted. The system includes chimes and bells for when to turn and when not to turn — for instance, when a child is crossing unnoticed in the path of a truck. The system automatically reroutes trucks when there’s an obstruction and also provides the best route to the nearest salt pile and garage.

There’s also a snow-complaint mapping application, which uses information collected by 311. And a Dataminr feed, just a month old, that customizes a selection of social media, using key words and phrases, to show what residents in the New York area are talking about — weather-wise, anyway.

Aside from three different weather services, the department seeks the counsel of Mitchel Volk, known among his colleagues in the department as Mitch the Weather Guy, a medical researcher who has a special love for meteorology.

“I take it all in,” said Ms. Garcia. “But in the end, I always look at the worst-case scenario.”