By Mariel S. Clark and Jill Colvin
DNAinfo Staff
MANHATTAN — Mayor Michael Bloomberg's popularity plummeted following the city's disastrous response to last week's blizzard, according to a Marist Poll released Thursday.
Just 37 percent of voters surveyed approved of the job the major was doing — his lowest rating since taking office. The poll also revealed that 71 percent of respondents disapproved of how Bloomberg handled the snow removal.
While 55 percent of voters in Manhattan still approve of the mayor's job performance, the percentages in the other boroughs were much lower, with Brooklyn giving him the worst marks — only 24 percent of people surveyed there thought he was doing a good job.
Earlier in the day, Bloomberg vowed to do a better job with snow removal, even using GPS monitors to track snowplows, as Mother Nature geared up to take another swipe at Manhattan.
Less than two weeks after a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow on on the city, New York could get two to five inches Friday, according to the National Weather Service.
The city on Thursday was placed under a winter storm watch for Friday morning through Friday night.
The MTA had also initiated its "Plan 4" snow response, a spokeswoman confirmed. Snow-fighting equipment is being prepared to keep rails snow and ice-free, and chains are being put on bus tires ahead of the storm.
After what he described as an "unacceptable" response to the blizzard that left streets unplowed for days, Bloomberg said the city's ready this time.
The Sanitation Department's 1,700 snow plows and 365 salt spreaders were at the ready, and private contractors were on call, officials said.
To make sure City Hall knew what was happening on the ground this time around, Bloomberg announced he would deploy special "SCOUT" teams (street condition observation units) with cameras to monitor the streets.
A pilot program will equip 50 sanitation trucks in Brooklyn with GPS tracking systems. If the system worked, the city would install a GPS device in every one of its 1,700 sanitation trucks, Bloomberg said.
"While I realize there were problems with the city’s snow clearing efforts last week, we want to assure all New Yorkers that we are doing everything in our power to make sure we don’t experience those kinds of problems again," Bloomberg told reporters at City Hall Thursday.
"We plan to do a great job, the kind of job that the public expects us to do," he said.
The snow was expected to start as light flurries early Friday morning but would steadily get heavier throughout the day, meteorologists said. Some bands of snow might even pile up seven inches or more in parts of the area, though forecasters weren't able to determine where the heavier snow would fall.
Although the snowfall was expected to be significantly less than the Dec. 26 blizzard, it could still snarl travel at airports and on roads especially during the afternoon rush hour, as the trip home could be "a real mess," AccuWeather said.
Bloomberg said the city had experienced about 70 snowstorms of this scale under his tenure.
While a comprehensive, multi-agency review of what went wrong last week is still underway, Bloomberg said one problem that was highly apparent was an information disconnect.
"[There was] a discrepancy between the information coming into and out of City Hall and what people were actually experiencing on the streets, which understandably led to a lot of confusion and frustration," he said.
He also announced a shakeup among emergency personnel.
EMS Chief John Peruggia has also been demoted, with 25-year FDNY veteran Abdo Nahmod now at the helm of the city's ambulance fleet.
Asked why he had chosen to demote the EMS chief, Bloomberg said he was looking for a new set of eyes.
"I think last week’s storms exposed problems in the way it’s operated," he said of EMS. "I decided that this city would be better off with a different person in charge."
Temperatures on Friday would barely make it above freezing with a high of 34, forecasters said. The weekend will be brisk with highs in the low to mid 30s and a cold breeze on Sunday making temperatures feel like the teens.
But as the snow piles and the temperature drops, there's one thing New Yorkers can celebrate.
By Thursday at midnight, every neighborhood will have been given at least one garbage collection, Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said.
The Department expects to be back on schedule next week.
New York City Transit has also canceled all planned service changes for this weekend, and Long Island Rail Road will be providing extra service on Friday afternoon for those looking to escape ahead of the storm.
