By Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN —New York City's transit chief apologized Friday for a disastrous performance during last month's blizzard.
At a City Council meeting Thomas Prendergast, the head of New York City Transit, reportedly admitted it took his agency 19 hours to accept the scale of problems the massive snow dump created.
The failure to act led to passengers being stranded on board subways for hours and left 650 buses stuck in the snow.
"We were 19 hours slow in formally issuing the highest level of alert," the New York Post quoted Prendergast, whose division of the MTA deals with buses and subways, as saying at the meeting.
"We were lulled into a false sense of security on our own. Nobody led us into that," he added.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was highly skeptical of Prendergast's comments.
"Lulled is not a particularly comforting word from a government official," she said.
"It snows here," Quinn said. "It happens. It's not like we got hit by a natural disaster we couldn't anticipate."
Prendergast said that there were two major mistakes made on the part of the MTA — firstly that emergency services were not organized before 20 inches of snow fell on Manhattan and, secondly, that a situation room was not set up to handle coordination during the storm.
The MTA promised that it will improve its planning in advance of storms in the future.
