Stupid contractor left hundreds of tenants homeless from building fire

Queens Chronicle

The five-alarm fire at a Sunnyside apartment building last Wednesday, Dec. 20, was determined to have been caused by the use of an illegal torch, the FDNY said last Thursday.

Hundreds of people were displaced by the blaze, according to the office of Borough President Donovan Richards; the American Red Cross in Great New York is assisting 242 people across 101 affected households. Thirty-nine of those 101 were being provided with housing through Wednesday, Dec. 27. Though a Richards spokesperson said members of some households in the building, which has 107 units, per Department of Buildings records, have sought shelter elsewhere with friends and family, it is not clear how many more were displaced; a spokesperson for the Office of Emergency Management said the agency only counts apartments, not people. The Red Cross is encouraging any remaining residents to register with the group.

Among those impacted by the blaze was Melissa Orlando, who has lived in the building for 16 years. She told the Chronicle she was getting out of the shower Wednesday when she smelled what she likened to a campfire.

“I looked out the windows to see if I could see if there was something going on outside,” she said. “I didn’t see anything. And I didn’t hear any sirens. So I went into the hallway to see if I could smell any smoke out in the hallway. I didn’t smell anything out in the hallway, and I didn’t see anything going on. So I just kept checking the Citizen app.”

Sure enough, within 10 minutes, Orlando got an alert for a fire in her own building. She and her son grabbed their coats, phones and wallets and left, alerting neighbors on the way.

According to the Fire Department, a contractor was working in a vacant unit on the sixth floor of 43-09 47 Ave. at about 12 p.m. last Wednesday, and was using a torch to heat lead paint off a metal closet door frame. The employee noticed smoke coming from the door frame, so he removed the plaster from around the frame and saw small flames on the wood studs. He attempted to put out the fire using a bucket of water.

Soon after, an FDNY captain with Engine 325 arrived, and was shown the wooden studs. That’s when the captain realized the fire had extended into the building walls, and ordered the contractor to leave. Soon, it spread to the cockloft, the space between the ceiling and the roof, allowing flames to spread from the middle two wings of the building to the outer two, FDNY officials said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon. Within an hour and 15 minutes, the blaze had reached five alarms. After over four and a half hours and 198 firefighters across 44 units responding, the fire was declared under control.

In total, 14 people suffered non-life-threatening injuries; eight of them were civilians, two were police officers and four were firefighters. Six were sent to either Mt. Siani in Astoria or to NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst; four of the 14 refused medical attention.

“Yesterday’s fire in Sunnyside was nothing short of devastating,” Richards wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, Thursday afternoon. “Hundreds of residents are facing so much uncertainty, just days before Christmas.”

According to the FDNY, the owner of the contracting company was issued three criminal summonses for the use of an illegal torch and lacking fire guards and a certificate of fitness.

Mayor Party Hardy Means Tardy

 

Hellgate NYC

Ten hours after the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning, five hours after the heavy rain began to fall across New York City, three hours after social media platforms began to be deluged with photos and videos of floodwaters stranding vehicles and commuters, 90 minutes after the MTA essentially told riders the trains were all too broken to be of any use, and 40 minutes after the press conference was supposed to start, Mayor Eric Adams spoke to New Yorkers for the first time about the flooding that continues to pummel the city that is under his control.

"We're ready, and you should be as well, to be prepared for this moment," Adams said.

What took him so long?

The mayor—flanked by a coffee mug and a tall paper cup, his voice sounding markedly more craggy and halting than usual (Adams had a "birthday fundraiser" in Inwood on Thursday night)—told reporters that he didn't need to be the first official to address New Yorkers about the flooding, because his deputies had already done so, in the form of sending out some Notify NYC alerts, appearing on 1010 WINS and Fox Weather on Thursday, and forwarding a press release to reporters at 11:08 p.m. on Thursday night. (Some of those deputies, including Deputy Mayor for Communications Fabien Levy, who earns an annual salary of $250,000, went even further, and snippily alerted reporters to all the alerting that had previously occurred.)

"Leadership is not only the mayor," Adams said. "It is all of those that are placed in those positions, and that is what you saw."

At the start of the presser, Adams said that he "got a firsthand look at the impact of the rainfall and what it is doing moving around the city," but later revealed that this was a little bit of serendipitous multitasking. On Friday morning, he had actually gone to a wake for a retired NYPD officer, and had driven back home through East New York, Canarsie, and Sheepshead Bay. 

Just six families had been successfully evacuated from flooded basement homes so far, according to Levy, but with two to four more inches of rain on the way, where could New Yorkers who live in basements go if their homes flooded? Where was the "higher ground" that NotifyNYC told basement apartment-dwellers to seek? The mayor didn't say, though he assured everyone that was being taken care of.

"We will have sites for those who can't go with family and friends, we will always provide shelter for those in need and we will navigate that," Adams said.

Zach Iscol, head of the mayor's Emergency Management division, assured New Yorkers they were "monitoring continuously," and "in very active response mode right now," but the evidence provided for that was simply more assurances.

"We're taking this extremely, extremely seriously," Iscol said.

For an event featuring the mayor, Governor Kathy Hochul, the head of the MTA Janno Lieber, and many leaders of City agencies, not a whole lot was revealed at this press conference. Despite the chaos on the street, everyone had convened to convince New Yorkers they were doing their jobs, and that the system is working, more or less. After the mayor thanked the governor, the governor thanked the mayor. "Mayor, you've been fantastic," Hochul said.

What about migrants staying in tent structures? No major leaks or flooding have been reported, Levy said.

 

Manhole exposed in Corona

 

Facebook 

Seen on Alstyne Ave. and 103rd St.. Truly a new low for the "World's Borough", but its just another day of negligence by the Department Of Transportation.

Talk about an open street. Nothing can get more open than this

A sign of mindless D.O.T. incompetence

  

NY Post

The Bronx got burned by a Department of Transportation mistake that listed the name of a Queens official on a welcome sign, sparking a jokey inter-borough beef.

A newly installed “Welcome to the Bronx” sign on the Hutchinson River Parkway coming off the Whitestone Bridge wrongly listed Queens Borough President Donovan Richards instead of the Bronx’s BP Vanessa Gibson.

Gibson, who just took office this month, tweeted “we’re trying” at the DOT Wednesday.

“I know it’s been a rough couple of weeks in the Bronx, but y’all didn’t have to get rid of me already,” she said.

Richards then jumped on the error, using the opportunity to flash some Queens swagger over the Boogie Down.

“Being the BP of by far the best borough in NYC comes with an understanding that everyone always has #Queens on their mind. It’s natural,” Richards posted in response to a NY1 reporter who tweeted about the typo. “But the Bronx and @bronxbp @Vanessalgibson deserve their due as well so I’ll happily cede this space and work with DOT to ensure that happens.”

Three more months of Dr. Chokshi

 NBC New York

 

Dr. Dave Chokshi, the commissioner of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, will stay on in that role through mid-March, Mayor-elect Eric Adams said Wednesday.

Chokshi will then be replaced by Dr. Ashwin Vasan, a primary care physician and mental health expert.

Chokshi, often referred to as "the city's doctor," became health commissioner in Aug. 2020. He also remains a practicing primary care physician at Bellevue.

Mayor Big Slow's pandemic response lab missed both Omicron and Delta variants

 Progress New York 

 The COVID-19 testing operation created in 2020 by Mayor Bill de Blasio (Working Families Party-NYC) when New York City was the epicenter of disease and death was supposed to lead the City out of uncertainty. Since then, the testing company has blossomed in testing contracts and worth, but its record of leading has been called into question after it was late in reporting the newest strain of the Coronavirus to threaten New York’s future : the Omicron variant.

As global worry has spread about the reported rapid rise in cases of the Omicron variant in Africa — a “heavily mutated” strain, which has led to border closings and travel bans amidst a new round of confinements — the world turned to Minnesota health officials to learn about the first case of Omicron in New York City. The silence from the City-created testing facility, the Pandemic Response Lab, did not go unnoticed by online critics of the Government’s pandemic response. Mayor de Blasio has been praising the Pandemic Response Lab since it’s creation, even as some media questioned the return on the City’s unknown investment in the company. Though Mayor de Blasio has hailed the testing being done by the Pandemic Response Lab for public schools as the “gold standard,” that claim was later rejected by a report published by the Gothamist news Web site.

After Progress New York made an interview request to the Pandemic Response Lab for this report, its parent company published a news release, announcing the sequencing of the lab’s first detection of the Omicron variant. Representatives from the parent company later promised to appear for an interview with Progress New York, but they never answered the request after inquiring about the subject of the interview.

Visit C’est Vrai to learn more about Pandemic Response Lab .

The Pandemic Response Lab has reportedly succeeded in cutting the time and cost it takes to process COVID-19 tests. Since it operates as a private sector business, its first order of business is profit, not the use of its funding to promote or protect the public health, regardless of cost.

The fortune-making from the Coronavirus pandemic has triggered accusations that the Government response to COVID-19 has led to large transfers of wealth. It’s unknown how much Government assistance the Pandemic Response Lab has received. It was created in 2020 by the City of New York’s corporate welfare arm, the New York City Economic Development Corporation. It began receiving testing contracts from the City’s public hospital system, and that has reportedly been expanded to include test contracts for individuals in the City’s jail system and the public school system.

As a result of its growth in Government contracts, the corporate owner of the Pandemic Response Lab, Opentrons Labworks Inc., was able to finance an expansion to Washington, DC ; Los Angeles, CA ; and Seattle, WA. In September, Opentrons secured $200 million in new investments by a team led by Softbank Group Corp., which valued the parent company at $1.8 billion, according to a report published by the Bloomberg news service. The pandemic has created a lot of wealth at Opentrons. Last year, the company’s valuation was only $90 million, according to the Bloomberg report, making its current valuation a 20-fold jump in worth.

The Pandemic Response Lab’s focus appears to be profit-making for its parent company. As a result, the City of New York was late in reporting the Delta variant. As revealed by Progress New York, the first time that the Delta variant was reported in New York City was in mid-May, in a retroactive disclosure in an overdue weekly variant sequencing study, even though the virus had by that time spread from India to Europe. Later, as the Delta variant was itself evolving into new sublineages, Progress New York noted that the City of New York was not reporting the AY.3 subvariant at a time when its spread was possibly threatening another confinement in the State of Israel.

School buses continue to leave students and parents hanging

NY Daily News 

A “cataclysmic” failure of New York City school bus transportation has left scores of city kids without buses for days or weeks — and some desperate families still waiting for a pickup more than a month into the school year, parents and advocates say.

Years of dysfunction compounded by the logistical challenges of restarting in-person classes amid the pandemic and a nationwide driver shortage have pushed transportation conditions in the city to a record low, according to families and school bus watchdogs.

“The busing situation in this city is cataclysmic,” said Amaranta Viera, the mother of a first-grader with autism who was without a bus for nearly a month after classes started on Sept. 13.

Some students legally entitled to school buses because of disabilities still have not been assigned a route. Others have a route, but no driver, matron or paraprofessional to pick them up. And some kids whose buses do show up are facing erratic pickups or hours-long rides, according to experiences shared with The Daily News.

“The problems are boiling over this year with kids missing not just hours, but days and weeks of school,” said Sara Catalinotto, the head of the advocacy group Parents to Improve School Transportation.

DOE officials said there are roughly 550 students who still need bus routes, a slight increase over the approximately 500 kids without routes at this time in 2019 and 2018 but still a small fraction of the 150,000 total kids who take school buses. Officials claimed all kids who were registered by the first day of classes now have a route.

But advocates say the number and severity of complaints pouring in this year are noticeably greater than in years past.

Catalinotto said she heard from eight families just last week who still don’t have a school bus, and 15 since the beginning of the year, compared to zero and three such complaints in 2019 and 2018. Another parent advocate who began compiling bus grievances at the beginning of the year got 58 hits, with half complaining of a no-show bus. The city’s Panel for Education Policy solicited bus complaints from parents for a recent meeting and got roughly 60 emails in three days.

“Typically by now, the bus issues would die down a lot, but not this year,” said Lori Podvesker, the education director of the special education advocacy group INCLUDEnyc and a member of the Panel for Education Policy.

The DOE also pointed to a 63% reduction in the number of calls to the Office of Pupil Transportation hotline compared with fall 2019, from roughly 6,400 calls per day in 2019 to 2,400 calls per day this year.

But parents say calling the OPT’s hotline is a lesson in futility because they either can’t get through or are directed to contact their schools or bus companies — discouraging them from trying again.

Positvely 118 Street

Impunity City 

 

This scene is in South Richmond Hill, 118th Street and 103rd Avenue. Back again.

The sinking hole is “repaired”. Just like the other ones on the ave.

 Another great shit job D.O.T Commissioner Gutman, fucking asshole, a bulbous waste of flesh Blaz crony hire who has 0 experience about city road infrastructure and traffic issues, who is using his shyster skill sets in “intellectual property practice” to “re-imagine” city streets.

 

...and now there's not

Demolition by incompetence at Rikers Island: Attorney-client privilege breached by free phone call system

  

 

NY Daily News

A clerical error by a city contractor breached the attorney-client privilege for scores of New York City inmates, with more than 1,500 protected jailhouse phone calls between defendants and their legal advisors wrongly recorded, the Daily News has learned.

The shocking mistake, affecting inmates facing charges in Brooklyn and the Bronx, could compromise the court cases of nearly 400 defendants if their confidential conversations landed in the hands of prosecutors.

The system, run by the city-contracted prison communications firm Securus Technologies Inc., mistakenly recorded 118 calls with 29 inmates facing charges in the Bronx and another 1,450 chats involving 353 inmates cases in Brooklyn, according to several jail and city sources familiar with the findings of two internal audits conducted by the company this year. The erroneous recordings occurred in all New York City jails, not just on Rikers Island.

According to a source, human error on the part of Securus led to the legal misstep. The Department of Correction provides the company with a list of protected phone numbers to ensure inmates’ conversations with lawyers, social workers and other legal parties are specifically not recorded.

 As expected, de Blasio's stench is all over this. 

Now they got a constitutional crisis. Rikers is being shut down on purpose.  

de Blasio's HPD incompetence gives greedy developer millions of dollars in subsidies he won't give back

 

NY Post

A city bureaucrat made a $6 million mistake in preparing documents for a deal with a developer — and it could jack up the intended rents on more than 100 “affordable” apartments, one of Mayor de Blasio’s signature issues.

The city included the wrong document in an agreement with a developer on a massive, $386 million waterfront development in Brooklyn, according to court records. And now he has a legal loophole he can drive a truck through.

Developer David Bistricer, who is building 770 apartments in three towers on Commercial Street in Greenpoint, has allegedly refused to let the clerical error be corrected, forcing the city to file a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit to fix it.

The project, part of a building boom in Greenpoint, was announced nearly a decade ago but only recently broke ground.

The city claims it negotiated the inclusion of 200 permanent affordable housing units in exchange for $2 million in taxpayer cash and $8 million worth of air rights from a city-owned plot adjacent to Bistricer’s Waterview at Greenpoint LLC site. The developer is slated to build Box Street Park on the plot, which is currently used by the MTA.

The deal was supposed to give the city housing with “deeper affordability,” and allowed Waterview to more than double the square footage. That increased affordability is “valued at more than $6 million,” the city said in its legal filing.

 As the city and Waterview hashed out final details of the agreement in May, a staffer with the Department of Housing and Preservation Development included an incorrect list of affordable rents and qualifying incomes to be offered to tenants.

For example, the city intended for at least 10 of the affordable units to rent for as little as $732 to $1,067 depending on size. But the lowest rent listed in the faulty document is $1,529, court records show.

Eligible incomes also drastically changed. The city wanted incomes ranging from $40,000 and up for a family of three to qualify. The lowest eligible earnings for a family of three listed on the erroneous paperwork is about $81,000.

If the mistake goes uncorrected, “134 of the 200 affordable housing units would be offered at different (and significantly higher) rents with different (and significantly higher) income restrictions,” the city claims.

 Possibly the biggest joke about this scandal is that the greedhead got away with only offering 10 apartments for lower income earners (and not specifically low income earners)

Contractor breaks a gas main in Floral Park

  

Queens Patch

 More than two dozen homes in Northeast Queens lost heat Wednesday after a contractor doing illegal construction work on the block sawed into their gas main, according to Con Edison.

Residents of 260th Street between Hillside Avenue and East Williston Avenue were evacuated about 3 p.m. after authorities were alerted to a gas odor on the block, spokespeople with the FDNY and Con Edison told Patch.

The gas was the result of a contractor working in the basement of a house on 260th Street, who had managed to cut into the high-pressure gas main that serves 28 homes on that block, according to Con Edison officials.

"That could've killed many people," Con Edison spokesperson Alfonso Quiroz told Patch.

ConEd is responding to natural gas outage in Queens, ZIPs: 11004 and 11001. Report service loss: 1-800-75-CONED. Multilingual & ASL Link: https://t.co/NEVjVDwlrv.
— NYCEM - Notify NYC (@NotifyNYC) December 2, 2020

Residents on the block have since returned to their homes but still had no gas service as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, as Con Ed crews continue making repairs to the gas main.

de Blasio's mobile Covid testing sites reported missing

 

Queens Eagle

The city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation said it would set up sorely needed mobile COVID testing sites this week in Jackson Heights and Corona. Residents there are still waiting.

Despite four-hour lines at COVID testing sites across Queens, HHC did not set up the testing locations as scheduled. A site that was supposed to administer tests Monday through Friday at Travers Park in Jackson Heights never opened due to inclement and severely cold weather, an HHC spokesperson said. HHC said the location will open Friday. 

To make matters worse, the testing site location is listed incorrectly on the HHC website, which says Travers Park is in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.

The Eagle learned about the missing test site when a reader reached out to say they had tried to visit three times. Another sent a photo of the place where the test site was supposed to be Thursday.

State Sen. Jessica Ramos was on her way to get a COVID test at Elmhurst Hospital when contacted to see if she knew about the missing site. Minutes later, she said she contacted city officials and learned that the Travers Park testing site was closed “due to weather” despite the sunny skies Thursday.

Another mobile testing site in Corona has also yet to open, said Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, who reached out to officials after the Eagle contacted her about the Jackson Heights location. She blasted Mayor Bill de Blasio and city agencies for failing to inform local leaders and communities about the closed test sites.

“The failure to inform the local elected officials and community that these sites would be closed during cold weather is yet one more example of Mayor de Blasio’s complete incompetence,” Cruz said. 

“It is incredibly frustrating to hear him announce seemingly great initiatives meant to save lives, that once again fail to deliver,” she said. “These are matters of life and death for my community.”

The 7-day COVID test positivity rate in Corona’s zip code 11368 reached nearly 6 percent Monday, according to the most recent Health Department data. Jackson Heights’ zip code 11372, where Travers Park is located, reached 2.82 percent. Both neighborhoods were among the hardest hit communities in New York City during the pandemic’s peak.

de Blasio's Citywide Administration Services allowed contractors to swindle the city during the start of the pandemic by sending the wrong face masks

 THE CITY 

 Last spring, frontline medical workers scrambled in vain to find proper surgical masks as the coronavirus swept through hospitals across the city.

Doctors, nurses and medical technicians were forced to reuse the same mask over and over — a dangerously ineffective method to stem infection from a virus that’s now taken the lives of more than 24,000 New Yorkers.

City officials jumped into action, signing more than $1 billion in emergency no-bid contracts with seemingly anybody who claimed they could produce high-quality masks and other crucial COVID gear — including ventilators.

Among them: Genuine Parts Company, an Atlanta-based firm that specializes in auto parts. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), which handles most of City Hall’s purchases, had bought parts for city vehicles from Genuine in the past.

An auto parts company from Atlanta?? Why? 

Go on...

According to internal records obtained by THE CITY, DCAS paid $348,000 for what was described by Genuine as 300,000 “non-Latex surgical masks” that were marked as “received” by the city on April 7. That was at the peak of the virus’ spread in New York City, when the seven-day average for daily hospitalizations hit 1,642, compared to this week’s 52.

 But records show that when DCAS’ Bureau of Quality Assurance inspected the delivered goods, workers discovered not surgical masks but “disposable single-use non-surgical mask/dust mask/Not FDA approved.”

The items were nevertheless deemed “accepted due to public necessity.” DCAS paid full price and placed subsequent orders for more masks from the car parts dealer, records show. DCAS then “redirected” the masks — useless in emergency rooms — elsewhere for non-medical use.

The Genuine mask purchase is part of a disturbing pattern uncovered during an investigation by THE CITY of DCAS’ pandemic-spurred emergency buying spree.

During some of the most dire weeks of the crisis, THE CITY found, the agency lost track of key equipment from masks to ventilators — driving an exasperated DCAS official to declare in one early May meeting: “Stop this s—t! Stop this s—t! Fix the problem!”

 And guess who also was involved in this honest incompetence graft? The Blaz's art dealer buddy Contractor Gadget

A similar scenario unfolded with another vendor, Digital Gadgets, an electronics firm whose CEO, Charlie Tebele, along with family members, has been a frequent donor to de Blasio’s various political campaigns.

In late March, DCAS awarded $19 million in no-bid contracts to Digital for high quality N95 masks and lower quality KN95 masks. That included an $8 million contract for what the firm promised would be two million “surgical grade N95s,” according to internal DCAS documents. 

 The company also won a $91 million contract to provide DCAS with ventilators that was later cancelled because, Benson told THE CITY, the agency “decided to order a different ventilator model.”

Digital Gadgets — which previously supplied hoverboards to QVC — did deliver masks. But DCAS records reveal that the agency’s Bureau of Quality Assurance discovered the masks Digital delivered were not “surgical grade N95s” as promised and had not been approved by either the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

New York City Board Of Elections are very shitty at math

 

NY Post

The embattled city Board of Elections mismanaged key facets of its early voting program, The Post has learned, including allocating ballot scanners with little regard for demand and stuffing so many voters into balloting sites that it overwhelmed its system.

The examination of the BOE’s preparations comes as thousands of New York City voters again faced hours-long lines Wednesday to cast their votes in the hotly contested 2020 general election, giving the patronage-ladened agency its latest black eye.

Take two locations in Brooklyn: The BOE only sent five ballot scanners to the New York City College of Technology on Jay Street, even though it assigned more than 60,000 voters to the site for early voting. And Barclay’s Center was allocated the same number of scanners, despite being the early voting spot for another 32,000.

That pattern repeats in Manhattan. The Board of Elections provided only five scanners to the early voting polling site at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua in SoHo, despite assigning it nearly 81,000 voters — roughly one scanner per 16,000 voters.

Just a seven-minute walk away, BOE also set up its smallest early voting polling site in the city at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts near Washington Square Park. However, officials set up three scanners for the 8,300 voters who can use the site — roughly one scanner for every 2,800 voters.

The Post sent reporters to 15 early voting sites in the two boroughs and found the scanners were unevenly distributed and that even busiest sites had no more than seven such devices.

“It makes no sense, it shows you how poor their planning is and how unprepared they were for people to use early voting,” said John Kaehny, the executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany. “I think the BOE has completely misallocated resources and failed to the simple math to figure out how many poll books and scanners it needs based on the number of likely voters.”

Mayor de Blasio is a shitty crisis manager

NY Post

When Mayor de Blasio dragged aides and members of his NYPD security detail to his Brooklyn YMCA Monday morning amidst the coronavirus outbreak, fellow fitness enthusiasts were coughing and sneezing — and a mentally ill person was walking around touching the equipment, a gym source said.


“It’s crazy that he made his staff and detail come with him to the gym and expose them like that,” the source said.


But the incident is just one example of the mayor’s disregard for the health of his staff during the crisis, multiple sources told The Post.


There’s also growing frustration from senior aides, who fault the mayor for dithering instead of making decisions, micromanaging instead of leading, and insisting he knows best instead of listening to others, three sources said.


‘Thank god for Cuomo,’ is a common refrain among the mayor’s staff, made only partly in jest, sources said.


That’s because Gov. Andrew Cuomo has taken the lead on the city’s COVID-19 response — canceling the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, shutting down large venues including Broadway, and even pushing the mayor to close public schools.


But instead of the big picture, the head of the City that Never Sleeps has insisted on proofing all public materials about the city’s COVID-19 response from press releases to ad campaigns, one source said.


“Instead of micromanaging his team he should be leading right now,” the source said.

And the mayor has tossed aside advice from staffers along the way. Staff repeatedly warned the mayor that prematurely announcing a possible shelter-in-place order Tuesday would cause unnecessary panic.


“He can’t handle the word ‘No,’ and it runs people down,” the source said.


“He is dismissive of everyone’s opinion around him,” added a second source.


“It’s very much his way or the highway in moments of crisis and he thinks he knows best,” the second source noted.

NY Post


Mayor Bill de Blasio has blamed President Trump for the city’s severe shortage of COVID-19 supplies even though City Hall didn’t secure its first order for emergency protective gear until March 6, The Post has learned.

Officials with the city’s Office of Emergency Management tried to purchase nearly 200,000 n95 masks on Feb. 7, but weeks later they learned the vendors had already run out.

It was not until March 6 and March 10 — over two months after the coronavirus outbreak first hit China — that they finally secured the first emergency procurements of masks and hand sanitizer, according to the city comptroller’s office.

“Our city is the epicenter of this outbreak in the United States, and we are lacking supplies because the mayor didn’t notice until two weeks ago?” fumed City Councilman Chaim Deutsch.

“We ought to have been prepared for this. Blaming Trump is an easy way to avoid hard questions, but it exposes a distinct lack of management on the part of this administration,” the Brooklyn Democrat said.

A City Hall spokeswoman said on Feb. 7, the city’s Office of Emergency Management tried to purchase nearly 200,000 N95 masks, but regular vendors had already run out. She added that the Health Department had already stockpiled 19 million surgical masks and said there have been no payment delays.

Comptroller Scott Stringer granted approval for the early March orders of masks and hand sanitizer the same day, but a medical supply vendor who has standing city contracts told The Post that initial requests for protective gear from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services were mired in bureaucratic red tape.

It took the agency an average of 72 hours to complete an order, he said.

“We’d send them a list of products we can deliver within 24, 48 hours,” said the head of one of the medical supply companies, who declined to be named for fear of jeopardizing his current contracts.

“The private sector is knocking on our door all day, every day. We have every hospital facility from Buffalo to across the country chasing us for the same product — N95 masks, surgical masks, gloves, hand sanitizer — and the city just moves so slow, I mean it’s a joke,” he said.

Imagine if Nero didn't fiddle while Rome burned, but while during it he was micromanaging and belittling his generals and making moronic decisions. That's our idiot mayor.

How President Donald Trump handled the burgeoning global Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic

NBC News


Luciana Borio once worked on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, but she left last year after a purge of the global health unit.

So when she realized how bad the coronavirus outbreak was likely to get — and saw that the Trump administration was not taking the necessary steps to contain it — all she could do was take her case to the public.

“Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic,” was the headline of her Jan. 28 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, in which she called for widespread testing and beefing up hospital preparedness. “The Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread at an alarming rate,” she warned in a subsequent op-ed a few days later.

Trump saw the situation much differently. While he blocked some Chinese nationals from entering the country in late January, his public message was simple: This is no big deal.

“We only have five people. Hopefully, everything's going to be great,” he said on Jan. 30. A few days later, he said, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

But in fact, the Trump administration hadn’t shut down the coronavirus. The testing that Borio and other experts called for never took place, even as Trump continued to downplay the risks and make a series of false statements that experts say muddied public understanding.

As the virus continues to spread across the United States, the nation is reeling, with schools closed, sporting and cultural events shut down, and an economy in danger of lapsing into recession. As many as 50 Americans have died.

An examination of how the Trump administration responded to the coronavirus outbreak that was first documented in December reveals a story of missed opportunities, mismanagement and a president who resisted the advice of experts urging a more aggressive response. All the while, Trump made a series of upbeat claims, some of which were flatly false, including that the number of cases was declining in the U.S. and that “anybody who needs a test gets a test.”

On Friday, Trump moved to take steps that experts said should have been done weeks ago, declaring a national emergency and launching a new, broader testing program.

Apparently, we just might have made these steps on day one when it was first reported if the President didn't decimate his National Security team.

In 2018, Trump fired his homeland security adviser, Thomas Bossert, whose portfolio included global pandemics. The next month, national security adviser John Bolton disbanded the NSC’s global health unit. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, the top official in charge of a pandemic response, also left his job. 
So did Borio, whose title was director for medical and biodefense preparedness.

None of them was replaced. That meant Trump had no top advisers in the White House with expertise in global pandemics.

“You organize your NSC around the threats you care about,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the U.S. government’s response to international disasters under the Obama administration.
Pandemics were deemed a lower priority for the Trump national security team, Konyndyk and other public health experts said.

I am going to get a lot of ribbing about this from a lot of devoted Crap readers, but right now it's better and definitively safer to have #TDS than the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Moving vehicle speared by wooden beam that fell off elevated 7 train tracks in Woodside.

QNS


Imagine driving your car down Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside and suddenly seeing a wooden plank falling off the elevated 7 line above and smashing through your windshield.
 
That’s the horrifying experience one driver had on Thursday afternoon — and somehow managed to walk away from the ordeal unscathed.

 
Police said the incident occurred at 12:28 p.m. on Feb. 21 in the area of Roosevelt Avenue and 65th Street.
 
According to law enforcement sources, the unidentified driver was behind the wheel of an SUV heading westbound on Roosevelt Avenue when the wooden beam fell off the 7 line superstructure above and impaled the vehicle.
 
City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer released extraordinary photos of the damage, with the wooden beam sticking out of the top of the window near the passenger side of the vehicle. If someone had been sitting there, Van Bramer indicated, chances are the passenger would have been seriously injured, or even killed, by the beam.


Miraculously, cops said, the driver was unharmed and did not require any medical assistance. 

Even so, Van Bramer said the frightening episode is another example of the poor state of the MTA’s infrastructure.
 
“‪Thankfully the driver was not injured, but someone could have been killed,” Van Bramer said in a statement. “There must be an immediate investigation into how something this dangerous could happen. MTA must answer for our crumbling subway infrastructure before a tragedy occurs.”