(December 23 WSB photo)
The City Council‘s second briefing on the December snowstorm response wrapped up a short time ago – after more than three hours. So much was said, we will publish several separate reports, each focused on a particular area, rather than one mega-report. First: An encore appearance by SDOT director Grace Crunican, toward the hearing’s end (following her stint on the hot seat yesterday), to talk more about the problems of getting, and keeping, the roads cleared. One key point was the issue of whether more help could have been called in. For example – the road grader you see above was one of several pieces of equipment borrowed from other city departments. SDOT also procured a small amount of private contractor help. Crunican revealed those details today: Two contractors were called in, one for three days, one for one day. She said they were called in at the peak of the problems, and discontinued because they felt they had a handle on the situation. In hindsight, she says, she realizes that wasn’t the case. Councilmember Nick Licata said at that point, “It’s clear that information was being exchanged between (city) departments, but was it being COORDINATED? We’ve talked a lot about departments communicating to the public, but what about the information from the public, to the departments? If SDOT thought it had a handle on the situation, that’s not what people were telling us.” West Seattle-residing Councilmember Tom Rasmussen also reopened the issue of who decides which routes get plowed first — Crunican said the official, publicly distributed SDOT plan (see it here) is evaluated annually — and voiced a concern that in WS, nothing west of California SW is on the map (see it here). Crunican (also a West Seattleite) mentioned that at one point, Admiral Way was plowed to 63rd, after the primary routes were cleared. Rasmussen suggested that Alki SW and Beach Drive should be on the plow routes and quipped that people who live uphill from there could “slide downhill on garbage bags” if they had to, to at least be able to catch buses along those routes. And back on the topic of bringing in private contractors, Councilmember Jan Drago said, “I’m the only councilmember who was also here in ’96 (the last major “snow event”) and this whole issue is ‘deja vu all over again’ … There was a huge public outcry to buy more snowplows. I want to know if the decisions that were made then are still in place. What we decided then was that storms were so infrequent, we weren’t going to invest in a big fleet of snowplows, but we did agree to retrofit a number of our own vehicles.” Crunican noted that the city had fewer than a dozen plows then and has 27 now, so, she said, “The question is, do you want to staff up for more, do we want to go the contracting route, or do we want to look at (retrofitting) other city vehicles?” She also said: “I’m not immune to the fact we didn’t get the job done for the public.” More recaps to come – next, we’ll write about how Metro director Kevin Desmond explained what went wrong with his system and how its status was, and wasn’t, communicated to riders.
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