The big freeze: New Yorkers continue to battle two feet of snow

NEW YORK - Hundreds of people were trapped in freezing subway carriages for hours overnight after the snow took out power to their train, even as others in New York continued to battle with extreme conditions in the wake of a weekend snowstorm, media reports said Thursday.

A 74-year-old woman who suffered a stroke had to be carried for several blocks on a stretcher through knee-deep snow after paramedics could not get close to her home, The Telegraph said.

Hundreds of people who were returning from JFK airport after their flights had been cancelled were trapped in freezing subway carriages for six hours overnight, it said.

A woman in Brooklyn was forced to spend the night with her dead father after the medical examiner’s office took more than 24 hours to reach them and remove his body.

Several people caught in a fire in Queens had to be dragged on sleds and toboggans to the nearest hospital, which was fortunately only five blocks away.

The New York post said the situation worsened after the Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts. This disastrous move had turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, it said.

A 75-year-old woman in Queens died after emergency services took three hours to arrive after she suffered breathing problems. It took her daughter 20 minutes to get through on 911, The Telegraph said.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed Wednesday night because of the shameless job action, the Post reported citing several sources and a city lawmaker.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labour issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited Wednesday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told (by supervisors) to take off routes (and) not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner.

“They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in combating a fierce, fast-moving blizzard like the one that barrelled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis.

And, effective Friday, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.

Sources said budget cuts were also at the heart of poor planning for the blizzard last weekend. The city broke from its usual routine and did not call in a full complement Saturday for snow preparations in order to save on added overtime that would have had to be paid for them to work on Christmas Day, the Post said.