According to The Wall Street Journal
On Monday, the city received more than 49,400 calls to 911, the sixth-largest volume in history, resulting that night in a backlog of roughly 1,700 calls to the NYPD and FDNY.
If you are good at math, you know that is 34 emergency calls every minute; one ever two seconds. In the time it's taken you to read this far -- that would be six calls. Six people in life-threatening situations, calling out for help.
Those calls don't stop and you can't wish them away. Now it's seven people. That's one unlucky number seven because you haven't even answered the prayers of the first six. If this doesn't make you feel tense, you're not paying attention.
Fortunately for you, we can put that carnage on hold and use this wake up call as a teachable moment. Now is the time to look back so we can move forward. The people who don't want to look back need to look around, because we are repeating the mistakes of the past and getting ready to repeat them again in the future. Think I'm kidding?
Follow me over the snow bank, and let's take a field trip to New York...
Let's start with mythology of Ronald Reagan's "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem." Republican's LOVE to quote that line. It's so pithy. Never mind it's wrong. It's got truthiness going for it. That's why some people look at what is happening in New York and say people need to stop complaining -- at least until Thursday. Why?
The public has been spoiled over the past 30 years: Starting with Mayor Ed Koch and Sanitation Commissioner Norman Steisel, we've had progressively better responses to big storms. In fact, we got too good at it. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was so proud of the city's response that he publicly embarrassed the Port Authority for not doing as good of a job with the runways at local airports.
You read that right. The problem isn't the snow. The problem isn't the failure of Republican governance. The problem is New Yorkers are spoiled because they are used to government working. We'll overlook the fact that Republicans were running the show the last time New York was hit by a catastrophe. That would be unfair. No one could have imagined such a thing would happen. Condi Rice said so. That makes it true, right?
But even if you buy that BS, you really want this woman and her baby to wait until Thursday to complain?
A blizzard baby delivered inside the lobby of a snowbound Brooklyn building died after an emergency call of a woman in labor brought no help for nine excruciating hours.
The baby's mother, a 22-year-old college senior, was recovering Tuesday night at Interfaith Medical Center, where her newborn was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. on Monday. That was 10 hours after the first 911 call from the bloody vestibule on Brooklyn Ave. in Crown Heights.
"No one could get to her. Crown Heights was not plowed, and no medical aid came for hours," said the student's mother.
That's a solution to the problem Grover Norquist would be proud of -- and they didn't even need Grover Norquist's bathtub. Some might think that's unfair. After all, some callers got better response times than that poor woman.
In Queens, a woman tried to reach 911 operators for 20 minutes Monday and then waited for three hours for first responders to arrive. By then, her mom had died, state Sen. Jose Peralta's office said.
Laura Freeman, 41, said her mother, Yvonne Freeman, 75, woke her at 8 a.m. because she was having trouble breathing. When the daughter couldn't get through to 911, she enlisted neighbors and relatives, who also began calling.
One of the callers reached an operator at 8:20 a.m., but responders stymied by snow-clogged streets didn't reach the Corona home until 11:05 a.m., said Peralta, who wants the death investigated.
"The EMS workers walked down the block trudging through snow," Freeman said. "They tried. I could tell by the look on their faces."
Think about that for a second. You know those poor bastards thought about it the whole way back to the station, tromping through the snow. Not to put too fine a point on that, but in the hour it took them to get there... and the hour it took them to get back... another 4,116 calls were made to 911. 4,116 more people in need. I'm sure some of them were dying, too. All of them were reaching out to their local government for help because they had a problem they couldn't handle.
It's amazing to think this happened all up and down the East Coast. Oh...wait a second. No it didn't. Other cities like Boston were better prepeared. How did they do it? Maybe they listened to the National Weather Service, that bastion of Commie Fascist Libtard Propaganda and took their warning seriously by mobilizing resources in advance of the storm. Of course, I could be wrong because I read that in that obscure Liberal Rag called the New York Times.
The storm, if it exposed shortcomings in the city’s emergency response system, did not take it by surprise.
The National Weather Service began issuing its first hazardous-weather outlooks for the city on Tuesday, Dec. 21. The alarm was modest, the sense of certainty elusive.
But by Friday, the Weather Service was forecasting a 30 to 40 percent chance of six inches or more of snow, most likely north and east of the city, accompanied by wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour, from Sunday afternoon into Monday.
"However," it cautioned, "a storm track only about 100 miles west of the expected track could bring a significant wind-driven snowfall to the entire region."
Over the next 24 hours, that likelihood grew, and an hour or so before dawn on Christmas, the Weather Service upgraded the notification to a winter storm watch, which called for six to eight inches of snow and strong, gusty winds for the city and the surrounding region.
City officials maintain that they were closely monitoring the updates. But the deputy mayor in charge of overseeing the snow response, Stephen Goldsmith, had left New York for the Washington area.
Heckuva job, there Chief. I guess in this guy's mind it was better to be in DC because what moron would want to go to NY? There was going to be way too much snow there for anything to move, right?
Remind me again how "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem." You might think it's unfair to blame Republicans for this failure of local government to meet the needs of people in a crisis. After all, this sort of catastrophe hasn't hit New York since John Lindsey was mayor in 1969. I won't point out he was a Republican. I'll point out that New York has indeed had large snowfalls in the recent past. But Democrats were in charge so they dug out. That's why some apologists are saying New Yorkers are spoiled.
Hell, let's forget about New York altogether. It's not "real America," anyway. You know that magical place Republicans love to invoke where "common sense" people get things done. If you really want to go down that road, I've got two words for you: New Orleans. It's still a mess.
New Orleans is a sore point with Republicans. But not just because of Katrina. The sad fact is Republicans have a long history of killing people by denying them the services government provides. Some of you may recall the stories of people in New Orleans commenting on the fact that elderly black folks in the ninth Ward had axes in their attics. That's because the last time those poor bastards had to deal with the raging Mississippi, it was 1927 and Sec. of Commerce Herbert Hoover was sent to help. People died trapped in their attics waiting for help that never came.
As you can see, all that talk about "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem" starts to get a little old when you start holding that pithy Reagan sound bite up to scrutiny. In case you think I'm taking that quote out of context, here you have it right from the horse's ...uhmm... right from the source.
The point here is that when Republicans like St. Ronnie raise that canard about "Government is the problem," what they are really saying is that "Republicans are not the solution to our problems. Republicans are the problem."
Remember that the next time someone talks about getting Republican help, because the message is clear: Help is not on the way.