christmas blizzard in new york

Christmas Eve 2010 was a quiet Friday in New York...

Thursday was the getaway day and, with people long gone for the holiday weekend, the streets and subways were quiet. The weather was unremarkable, seasonably cold and cloudy. A coastal storm was expected to arrive early Sunday, with five inches of snow forecasted for the tri-state area. But that forecast, like just about everything else, was about to change.

At midnight on December 24th, 2010, the National Weather Service increased its predicted snow total to eight inches. But by the following afternoon, on Christmas Day, it issued a Blizzard Warning and predicted fourteen inches of snow for New York.

December 2010 North American blizzard

And then it came. The snow started Sunday morning, on one of the busiest travel days of the year. It fell throughout the day and through the long night.

After midnight on Monday, December 27, it really started to come down. Snowfall rates accelerated to three inches per hour, bringing whiteout conditions. The city began to get reports of snowbound ambulances and buses, and of abandoned cars blocking the streets.

The problem got worse throughout the night. Tow trucks and New York City Fire Department trucks sent to rescue stranded ambulances also got stuck. As the sun came up on Monday, complaints were flooding in from all over the city about snow-clogged roads and missing snowplows.

That morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg gathered with his leadership team before a hastily called press conference inside a cavernous Department of Sanitation garage in downtown Manhattan.

The Press Secretary and agency commissioners normally spend a few minutes walking the Mayor through a list of talking points before a press conference. But this was not a normal day. Everybody had been working the job since Saturday night and they were exhausted. The Mayor was crankier than usual, and they were pressed for time. They did not push hard enough to get him properly briefed.

New Yorkers had just been hit by the biggest snowstorm they had ever seen. Transit was at a standstill and ambulances were stranded in four-foot drifts. But the Mayor didn’t understand the magnitude of this crisis as he stepped up to the podium.

Bundled in an overcoat and scarf, the Mayor began: “Yesterday’s blizzard was historic, but we are making progress. I ask all New Yorkers to be patient…” After delivering his prepared remarks, the Mayor opened the floor to questions.

“The storm has sent city emergency services into a nose dive. Ambulances and fire trucks are trapped in snow and facing long delays,” said Marcia Kramer, the venerable chief political correspondent for WCBS-TV. She then asked the Mayor, “Are people dying in the streets?”

“People are dying, just, naturally,” Bloomberg replied. "Just because an ambulance gets there, doesn't mean you can save a person. The science isn't that good."

Standing at the podium with his commissioners arrayed behind him, the Mayor grew defensive. Instead of explaining the challenges the City faced in responding to a fierce snowstorm; instead of describing in detail how bad it was in the streets; instead of talking about what the city had not yet done and when it was going to do these things, the Mayor seemed to point the finger at drama queen New Yorkers. “The world has not come to an end,” he said. “The city's going on. Many people are taking the day off. There's no reason for anybody to panic.”

He followed this with advice for New Yorkers on what they should do instead of bitching about snow. “Broadway is open; the NYC ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker is on. People should have gone to the park and enjoyed this time with their families.”

This struck a chord. New Yorkers were dying in ambulances mired in city streets and the Mayor was telling people to go to the Nutcracker. Reporters who had been leaning against the wall or slumped in their seats suddenly perked up. One pulled a pencil from behind his ear and began to write furiously in his notebook.

The blood was in the water, in the form of outrage, shame, and political retribution, from which the Bloomberg administration would take months to recover.

the quickest route to outrage is to deny the reality

The December 2010 North American blizzard was a major nor'easter and historic blizzard that affected the entire east coast of the United States and portions of Canada. It dumped between eighteen and twenty-four inches of snow on New York—twenty-nine inches in parts of Staten Island—and brought wind gusts of up to sixty miles per hour.

On that cold Monday morning, New Yorkers were trapped in a parallel universe where nothing seemed to work and very little made any sense. Their expectations were simple. They wanted someone to be accountable for the problem and for the solution. In New York City that someone is government. New Yorkers rightly expected that Mike Bloomberg's city government would immediately start to move mountains on their behalf, but at that moment the only mountain they were seeing was the mountain of snow that filled their street. They began to lose their patience and, eventually and inevitably, tempers flared.

This is a textbook case. People affected by disasters always become deeply skeptical of communication from the outside. Everything we (meaning the response community) says is garbled as it passes through the wormhole and resonates terribly inside the echo chamber of their parallel universe.

They see all sides of every issue and will jump onto the side of the issue that we ignore. For instance, too much reassurance will backfire. The more we say ‘it’s safe’, the more they will know that it’s not. The more we emphasize our innocence, the more they will be convinced that we are guilty. The more confident we try to sound, the less confidence they will have in us.

The only way to make any headway with them is to commit to them via a trip through the wormhole and into their parallel universe. Only when we are physically in their midst will they start to listen with an open mind. Even then we must be very careful. We must always and everywhere convey an intimate understanding of their situation. Every message must include a detailed picture of what they are seeing, feeling, thinking, and experiencing. This is how we build a bridge to the people who matter most. This is how we battle the outrage to create a bond; a bond built on credibility and trust. That’s the only way we can get it. There aren’t two ways.

Kelly McKinney is the AVP of Emergency Management + Enterprise Resilience for NYU Langone Health in New York City and the former Deputy Commissioner for Preparedness at the New York City Office of Emergency Management. He is the author of Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them published by Post Hill Press