New Mayor vs. Al Roker. I’d call it a heavyweight battle, but Al hasn’t been a heavyweight for a long time. Still, hugely popular weatherman calls out NYC mayor all the way from Russia. Good fun.
As regular readers of this blog know, I take my girls to school every day. We ride scooters. It’s about a half a mile to school. Snowy days make us walk. So this morning we walked.
My oldest, who was hoping for a snow day, walked out into some seriously heavy snow, with about 2-3 inches on the ground, and immediately said, “yeah, this isn’t a snow day”. It was actually quite pleasant. The snow was mostly fluffy but with decent snowball potential. It wasn’t that cold and there was no ice at all. We had one block with a serious head wind but other than that it was a fun walk to school.
Later it switched to sleet/rain and got a bit nasty, but that was around 11. By the time school let out, it was relatively warm with a light rain.
I read that the head of the teachers’ union criticized the mayor for not cancelling school. But that makes total sense. Of course the teachers wanted a snow day. Why not?
Closing schools in NYC is a huge deal. The number of parents who have to scramble (most businesses do not close) is huge. NYC has this thing called the subway. Being underground, it works really well in the snow. We also have a ton of snow plows. I can go online and see how long since my block was plowed (thanks Bloomberg). The red building is my place. This is as of 4:30 PM today. If you can’t read the legend, green is plowed within the last hour, blue is within the last 3. NYC can handle snow.
This was a big storm and closing schools was a close call. In the past 35 years, NYC has closed schools only 11 times. Again, it’s that subway thing.
Al Roker, to defend his position, tweeted this:
But that’s really misleading. 1-3 was before school today (accurate where I was). The warning covers until 6 am Friday morning. That’s how this storm has been described all along, snow then rain then more snow. Is the rush hour traffic going home tonight bad? Via Google at 5PM.
So like most people, I’ve always loved Al Roker. I think you can argue whether NYC schools should have closed today, but from where I sit being open was totally the right call. I most certainly do not think you can say, “Is there no one there with any common sense?” as Al did.
And my 11 year old who desperately wanted a snow day agrees.
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