Big Apple dodges big bullet and big cost in snowstorm
NEW YORK — The nation's largest city had a snow day without much snow Tuesday, as the return of mass transit and vehicular traffic was accompanied by some grumbling and second guessing from those with a week's supply of groceries, a day's lost sales or a living room of antsy children.
It was the talk of social media, one of the few forms of recreation available in a city where almost everything else had been shut down. "I would like to point out that this was SNOW-verhyped,'' assistant account executive Rachel Jerome — obviously with some time on her hands — wrote on Twitter.
"Snow big deal,'' joked other New Yorkers, irked at the false alarm yet happy to be spared a reprise of Sandy, the storm that smashed the city in 2012 en route to becoming the second costliest in U.S. history with loses of about $65 billion.
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There were no immediate accurate estimates for how much the government spent to prepare for the storm, or how much those preparations — including the first total shutdown in the subway's 110-year history and a rare ban on private vehicular traffic — cost in lost commerce.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the public costs, including snow removal, salt purchases and worker overtime, "are factored into budget, and this (storm cost) was not exceptional.''
As for private costs, the storm was in some ways an economic wash. For every store that lost business, like Macy's, another was inundated, like the Fairway supermarket on Broadway, where lines stretched out the door Monday and some shelves were cleaned out.
Other businesses recovered quickly. On Broadway, for instance, only three shows were scheduled to perform Monday. All were cancelled, but most shows performed Tuesday as scheduled, with the notable exception of Aladdin and The Lion King .
Elisa Shevitz, spokeswoman for league, which represents Broadway theaters, said the storm's impact on grosses won't be known until next week.
Kallie Ciechomcki, a 26-year-old classical musician who lives in Brooklyn, said the snowstorm hype cost her several hundred dollars after some rehearsals and teaching lessons were cancelled.
It wasn't unexpected, she said -- she had a feeling Monday the storm wouldn't be as bad as predicted. "It was so hyped up,'' she said. "This always happens. … I'm from Maine, and so we take snow a little less seriously up there."
For others, the cost was aggravation.
"I listened to the news, school was closed. My babysitter said, 'I can't come in'; the dog walker said, 'I can't come in.' No taxis, no subways," said Susanne Payot, who then told her daughters: "We have to walk the dog!"
But they were amazed by how little snow they found in the park. "I don't understand why the whole city shut down because of this," she told The Associated Press.
Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the closings, saying that the storm was "as big and as real as projected, (but) it moved east,'' slamming an area from Long Island to eastern Massachusetts instead.
Meteorologists were contrite.
"My deepest apologies to many key decision makers and so many members of the general public,''Gary Szatkowski of the National Weather Service's bureau in Mount Holly, N.J., posted on Twitter.
Jim Bunker, another NWS staffer, said forecasters will review the storm and "see what we can do better next time."
Analysts said that when de Blasio and other officials acted Monday — the mayor called it "a no-brainer'' — they had no choice.
"In hindsight, we all have 20-20 vision, but no one would have thought this storm would have stopped at 6 inches in the city,'' said Samuel Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner and now a private consultant. (Central Park's 6 inches was less than a quarter of the "historic" snowfall widely predicted.)
"People are grumpy. I lost some business myself because I had to close my office,'' Schwartz said. "But that's an inconvenience. The grousing will pass. It would have been far worse not to warn people.''
He cited several recent cautionary tales, including those of storms that stranded motorists in their cars on the roads in metro Atlanta and Chicago. And, he said, "(Hurricane) Sandy is much on the mind of every public official.''
Cuomo, governor during Sandy, seemed to confirm that: "I would much rather be in a situation where we say we got lucky, than one where we didn't get lucky, and somebody died.''
Cuomo has said he wants New York to create the nation's best weather-monitoring system, one more robust than the National Weather Service and better able to predict storms like the ones that regularly bury western New York, including Buffalo.
Preparing for storms, whatever the cost, is cheaper than getting hit. Sandy, which flooded areas of New York and New Jersey, wreaked an estimated $65 billion in damage, making it the second costliest storm in U.S. history. Hurricane Irene, which hit the city in 2011, cost about $16 billion, ranking it No. 7.
Contributing: Yamiche Alcindor