City Blows It

Whose bright idea was it to have the plows, garbage trucks and heavy equipment clearing school parking lots - schools that everyone knew were going to be closed for at least a day, maybe two - while CPD lots and CFD firehouses remained buried under drifts 3 feet deep?

And Lake Shore Drive? The clusterfuck that keeps on giving:

• More than 200 abandoned cars remain stranded, shrouded in snow on Lake Shore Drive and it's not clear when the drive will reopen, said Daley Chief of Staff Raymond Orozco in a press conference Wednesday afternoon.
  
  Crews are expected to work through the night to clear what has become a sore spot for the mayor's administration, but officials said they don't know when the lakefront roadway will be re-opened.

Lake Shore Drive was getting pounded by 30-foot-waves on Monday. It should have been shut down the minute the snow began to fall and plowing efforts concentrated on alternatives to keep traffic moving on adjacent arterial streets. Orozco or Byrne or whomever blew this one big time.

We especially like how the city officials are blaming the citizens for assuming an unblocked, unrestricted, wide-open entrance ramp means they shouldn't be using a major thoroughfare to get to where they want to go. We certainly hope this is a new trend of blame. Maybe we can blame the parents for having children who think "wilding" down Michigan Avenue is acceptable behavior, that snatch-and-grab phone robberies on the El is a good time, that daily riots at the pre-penitentiary high schools is normal behavior, that slinging dope and teen pregnancy is normal and that three meals a day, no-strings-attached cash, "free" heat and electricity is somehow a birthright.

And since when has the mayor not showing up at press conferences been any sort of example of leadership?

Here's the thing about natural disasters - they can reveal all sorts of shortcomings with emergency plans. In fact, a relatively benign occurrence like a blizzard could be used as a training exercise to test a response to shutting down a major arterial highway, evacuating abandoned vehicles, relocating crashes, mass rescues, clearing roads, etc.

How much of that did you see in action Wednesday? If you said "zero," you're pretty much right on target. We better hope with all our hearts that Chicago is never singled out as a target of a major terror incident. Individual acts of heroism might be a regular happening, but a cohesive strategy to address the aftermath is so far beyond our leadership it isn't even funny.