Winter Hands New Yorkers Double Whammy

By KIRAN SURY

with Anthony Ricketts, Craig Rogers & Amanda Rodriguez

Still digging out of a major snowstorm on Tuesday outer borough New Yorkers braced themselves for another belt of winter the following day.

According to the National Weather Service, another four to eight inches are due Tuesday night through Wednesday evening, adding to the eight inches leftover from Monday’s flurries.

Debra Cox, an English teacher at Far Rockaway High School, was disappointed with the city’s preparation efforts. “The street sanitations are not effective as they used to be,” she said. “When a snowstorm was to hit, there would be street sanitations lined up on the road ready to put salt on the street. Now there’s hardly any trucks lined up.”

In a press conference yesterday Mayor De Blasio defended the city’s snow strategy of focusing on clearing primary roads. But for the less-critical secondary and tertiary local roads many citizens were left to their own devices.

Marcus Izolli, manager of a pizzeria in Ozone Park, said he was forced to take care of what the city could not. “Sanitation doesn’t do much of a cleanup which means I have to pay my boys to do the cleanup for me,” he said.

Carlington Smith, a TSA security officer from Far Rockaway, said the snow gave him extra work. “I have to shovel the snow on my block and go to work and shovel the snow there,” he said. “And then do my security duties.”

In JFK airport, some football fans remained stranded on standby. Joe Zaccaro, a Broncos fan who spent $12,500 on a Superbowl VIP package and was put on a series of cancelled flights starting yesterday afternoon said it wasn’t worth the trip here. It’s “not just because my team didn’t win,” he said.

For New Yorkers like Sheldon Elliot, a security guard at New York-Presbyterian hospital, no amount of snow can stop them from getting to work. Some nights he sleeps over rather than commute from his home in Far Rockaway. His job doesn’t have snow days. “It can be a snow blizzard that can reach to 12 inches of snow and I still have to be at work.”