On Tuesday, they were explaining where it went wrong.
"While a lot of things went right, we have more work to do before the next storm hits," said Mayor Byron Brown. "One of the biggest disappointments during this storm was the new GPS technology and its public facing component. The new system helped plow drivers, but it did not do much for our residents."
The GPS tracking aided internal snow-removal operations and the emergency response, but it did not properly communicate the same data publicly, Brown said.
"All the information was there, but it wasn't presented properly," the mayor said.
The city launched the GPS tracking so residents could look at an interactive map and pinpoint the snow-removal status along 800 miles of street.
City officials are working with the vendor to fix glitches, and they hope to have the problems fixed before the next snowstorm.
Most of the problems were related to functionality and mapping.
Brown, along with the city's Department of Public Works Commissioner Nathan Marton and Parking Enforcement Division Commissioner Raymond Wagner, held a news conference Tuesday to report on the city's response to the early winter snowstorm last week that blasted the region with record amounts of snowfall.
One of the bugs in the system was mapping complications, Marton said.
The map the city used to generate what the public saw didn't have the exact metrics "so that caused some reporting problems," he said.
In addition, some of the GPS units were "sporadically" turning themselves off and on.
"So we don't exactly know what that is, and there's a quick shut off and turn back on, so it's random (and) it's not always the same unit or the same time," Marton said.
And some of the units "weren't functional," he added.
"So we've identified those three problems," Marton said. "We're working with GPS vendor to get the issues fixed by next storm" at no additional cost to the city.
In addition, equipment from New York State and Erie County used to help Buffalo's snow response are not part of the GPS tracking, so they didn't report, said Marton, who hopes to change that.
"We think that's a gap that hopefully we can look at. We're working to see if there's a way that we can temporarily have those units put into those vehicles as well — that equipment — to help provide a better overall picture to the public of what's happening on the streets," he said.
The mayor emphasized the errors with the system did not interfere with or impact the city's snow fighting response.
"The GPS system was to provide transparence for the public," Brown said. "It has absolutely nothing to do with our snow response. So whether that existed or didn't, that would not improve the response."
In other updates:
Mini-tows
Illegally parked cars were a main challenge in last winter's snowfalls, but not so much this time, Brown said.
There were 175 mini-tows to available legal parking spaces within 500 feet.
"Our residents paid attention," he said. "Most residents followed the guidance that we put out. All of that helped tremendously in plowing and hauling away snow."
Hauling snow
City crews hauled close to 8 million pounds of snow, almost enough to fill Buffalo City Hall three times, officials said.
The snow went to various dump sites, including Seneca Street engineering garage, Fillmore and Buell avenues, Houghton Park parking lot and Fuhrmann Boulevard.
Overall, Brown assessed the snow-removal effort as improved.
"When you look at how our workforce performed in comparison to prior states of emergency, we performed better," Brown said. "But we clearly need to do more because our climate is changing. There is no doubt about that, and these historic storms are becoming more of the norm."
© 2022 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
