CB 11 Officials Blast City’s Uneven Snow Removal

Officials at Community Board (CB) 11 plans to meet with the borough’s sanitation committee to address the city’s bizarre snow removal patterns this winter, which they say left half of the neighborhood’s streets piled high with snow and other half overloaded with salt.

“This district had a very uneven performance in terms of snow and ice removal. Either we got pounded with salt with no snow, or we got no salt with a 10-inch snow,” said the community board’s chair Bill Guarinello at the March 11 meeting at the Bensonhurst Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare (1740 84th Street).

Excess salt puts neighborhoods at risk by seeping into the ground, destroying infrastructure and causing manhole explosions, added district manager Marnee Elias-Pavia.

In addition, Department of Sanitation plows seemed to favor Bay Ridge over CB 11 neighborhoods as the city got pounded by snow storms this winter. Residents of Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, and Bath Beach complained to CB 11 officials their roads were piled with the snow and ice for several weeks straight while in Bay Ridge, streets were cleared at a comparably efficient pace.

Guarinello, who lives just three houses away from CB 10, observed the stark contrast from his home. He said his Dyker Heights neighbors “terrorized him” because their streets were sheathed in snow and ice all winter long while it was clearly visible that a few blocks over on 13th Avenue, the streets were black and snow-free.

“How could two community boards be that far off? There’s something wrong in the formula here,” said Guarinello.

One reason for the disparity, Guarinello speculated, is that plows assigned to CB 11 seem to be responsible for maintaining exterior highways like the Belt Parkway first, while CB 10 trucks have no such obligation, and are therefore able to divert the full resources toward residential streets.

Kathy Dawkins, a spokeswoman for the Sanitation Department, defended the agency’s snow removal patterns to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

“Before the first snowflake hits the ground, the department’s salt spreaders are ready to go. When snow does start to fall, our salt spreaders are immediately dispatched throughout the five boroughs. As soon as the weather forecast predicts snow accumulation of two or more inches, we start fitting our collection trucks with plows so they are ready to go to work. This is done in each of the 59 sanitation districts throughout the city. Each district has its own contingent of spreaders and plows,” she wrote in an email to the outlet.