Sanitation workers guzzled beer, slept in their trucks and racked up a fortune in overtime while sitting around in stranded trucks instead of unclogging city streets during last December’s crippling blizzard, officials said yesterday.
The Department of Investigation described a domino effect of failures in a scathing report that capped a five-month probe into the mishandled cleanup efforts that enraged Big Apple residents and left many trapped in their homes.
The problems ranged from not declaring a snow emergency — which would have kept cars off main roads — to the Sanitation Department’s inexplicable order to stop salting streets as 20 inches of snow mounted.
“The response to this storm did not meet our standards or the standards that New Yorkers have come to expect from us,” Mayor Bloomberg’s office said in a statement.
Sanitation “will improve many of their procedures to ensure that snow-removal operations function well in the future.”
The most disturbing find — as first reported by The Post — was that Sanitation workers bought beer at a Brooklyn deli after their trucks got stuck under piles of snow on Dec. 27.
Surveillance video from Ocean Mini Mart, on 18th Avenue, shows two uniformed workers purchasing a Corona six-pack at about 9:35 p.m., a block from where a bus and three plows were stuck, the report says.
DOI investigators grilled the four, one of whom admitted he and two others bought the beer and returned to their vehicle. A fourth crewman also purchased and drank beer, according to the report.
The report on the storm — the sixth biggest in city history — was forwarded to city officials and prosecutors investigating accusations that Sanit bosses staged a slowdown to protest Bloomberg’s budget and staffing cuts.
Though investigators said there was no clear evidence of an organized work action, Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens) continues to question the work ethic of the plowmen.
“Disturbing questions remain about why plows went down streets with their blades up or sat unmoving for hours as the snow fell,” he said yesterday.
Other examples of ineptitude were three plows stuck outside a Dunkin’ Donuts on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn for 27 hours. Drivers kept the vehicles idling until they ran out of gas.
Failures piled up
The Department of Investigation found a slew of failures from the December blizzard, including:
* Workers sleeping and drinking beer on the job
* Not enough tire chains — and the ones they had frequently broke
* Sanitation stopped salting too early, even though workers believed it was effective
* A snow emergency should have been called to keep cars off the street