Massive snow piles were still clogging up streets near Big Apple hospitals more than a week after deadly Winter Storm Fern — creating dangerous obstacles for emergency responders, The Post has learned.
Several EMS workers at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center on Monday said they’re having serious trouble maneuvering between the snowy mountains, with a Post reporter observing at least six blaring ambulances stuck in gridlock traffic along York Avenue.
“This is one of the worst snow removals that I’ve seen. It’s been a while since we’ve had this amount of snow but it is affecting the traffic,” an EMT of 10 years said outside the Upper East Side hospital.
“The snow piles along the street, the double parking of cars plus the buses that can’t pull into their stops— it makes it difficult to get around,” he said.
Another EMT, who has been on the job for nine years and also declined to be named, agreed: “It’s been a mess on the street.”
“It’s hard for us to maneuver the stretchers through the snow,” she said — as hardened snow stood piled up on each street corner around the hospital complex.
“It’s ridiculous. You can’t let passengers out on top piles of snow,” said an Access-A-Ride driver.
One of a pair of EMTs — trapped in the traffic on their way to an emergency call — added: “It’s been really bad.”
“You can’t go anywhere. It’s nearly impossible — and we’re on our way to a call right now,” he said.
“In other countries, they actually take the snow off the ground,” the first responder said. “Here, we just push it to the side.”
Department of Sanitation workers have returned to the area around both Weill Cornell and Memorial Sloan Kettering multiple times to address roughly a dozen snow and ice-related complaints since the Jan. 25 storm, according to a Post analysis of 311 data.
Rick, a 69-year-old patient who took the city’s free Access-A-Ride service to the hospital, said it took him nearly an hour to get to Weill Cornell – and he only lives about 20 blocks away.
“I told him to let me out in the middle of the street closest to the crosswalk because there is no other way to get to the sidewalk,” he said.
Consistently below-freezing temperatures have preserved the icy snow piles for much longer than usual since Fern dropped over a foot of flurries Jan. 25.
City sanitation crews have melted over 122 million pounds of snow — using gargantuan “hot tubs” — and scattered over 209 million pounds of salt across Gotham as of Monday.
One bus stop outside Sloan Kettering’s cancer center was dangerously plagued by piles of snow for days after the storm, with wheelchair, walker and cane users unable to navigate tiny paths carved out to the bus lane.
The stop appeared to be fully cleared by a Department of Transportation crew Monday, with snow nowhere in sight after The Post highlighted reports of patients even falling off of buses.
The week-long snow removal effort has prompted calls in the City Council both to hold a sanitation hearing and establish a clear inter-agency snow response plan defining which agency was responsible for different types of snow removal.
Depending on the affected location, the responsibility of snow removal can fall on private owners or agencies ranging from Transportation to Sanitation to Parks.
“In too many cases, agencies were bouncing responsibility back and forth while residents waited for hazardous conditions to be addressed,” Councilman Frank Morano wrote in a Friday letter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, urging for a streamlined “map” of responsible parties.
Trash, snow, or dog poop piling up in your neighborhood? The New York Post is tracking the snow storm mess in NYC. Send us your photos to include in our trash map by uploading them here. You can also email photos, including when and where they were taken, to online@nypost.com.
“That’s not a personnel issue – it’s a systems issue. We owe New Yorkers a clearer, faster response the next time a storm hits.”
Sanitation workers were continuing to work 12-hour shifts to “continue to remove snow, to break up big ridges, to haul it away to massive snow melters – property owners must do their part,” a DSNY spokesperson told The Post, “but the work is ongoing.”
As of 7 a.m. Monday, DSNY has written about 1,900 summonses to property owners for failure to clear snow and ice from a sidewalk and about 50 for illegally throwing snow back into the street or into a bike lane.
Read the full article here
