City Installs High-Tech Babysitters On Plows

The GPS devices, installed on trucks in areas hit hardest by last week’s storm, will also enable sanitation workers to directly communicate with their supervisors if they spot a problem, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday at a press conference at City Hall.

But today's relatively small snowstorm — roughly 3 inches are expected to fall — won't lead to the same outcry over the city's response. By midday the streets remained clear, and several snowplows were seen spraying salt on main thoroughfares like Smith Street and Atlantic Avenue. 

Bloomberg also said he was deploying the city’s “Scout Teams,” video units usually used to pinpoint quality of life issues, to send live feed back on street conditions to City Hall.

“Whether those will be useful or not, I don’t know, but we are going to try it,” he said.

The GPS devices were installed following reports of an intentional slowdown by sanitation workers in response to contract disputes.

Yesterday, Bloomberg also acknowledged that there were with last week’s cleanup.

“We want to ensure all New Yorkers that we are doing everything in our power to make sure we don’t experience those kinds of problems again," he said.

Bloomberg said the city has started “a comprehensive review of what went wrong and why” that includes a close look at the inability of 911 to handle the influx of calls.

The many complaints about the handling of last week's blizzard has shaken up the Department of Sanitation.

Bloomberg noted “some management and personnel changes” have been made in the department's Brooklyn division but that the changes don’t take effect until Monday.

“When something goes wrong, we stop everything, we find out why it went wrong – and we fix it,” he said.