While most New Yorkers slept Sunday night, workers with the city’s Sanitation Department went into what they call full force posture.
Some 2,600 workers headed out for a 12-hour shift, plowing 99.3 percent of the city’s streets by 5:30 a.m. on Monday, when they clocked out and another 2,600 workers then took over.
The Sanitation Department also expanded its emergency snow shoveler program — tripling participants since the last storm in January, which brought 15 inches — and had shovelers working overnight.
More than 2,500 emergency snow shovelers are registered, and more than 1,400 are working in a 24-hour period.
The department also created a new program that uses geotag coding, essentially a digital map, to identify specific areas — like crosswalks, unsheltered bus stops and fire hydrants — that have to be cleared of snow.
New Yorkers can track which streets have been plowed using Plow NYC, a tool that was created around 2013 but has been upgraded. It now allows people to type in their addresses and see when streets nearby were last plowed.
A relentless winter of storms has worn on city residents, but this blizzard — which carpeted Central Park with more than 15 inches of snow so far — has brought particular pressures for the Sanitation Department.
Typically, the department assigns its workers to three eight-hour shifts, but they are now working two 12-hour shifts.
That means the department will have to cover overtime pay, at rates of either time and a half, or double time, according to Josh Goodman, spokesman for the department. (Sunday is double time, weekdays are generally time and a half.)
Mr. Goodman said this storm is the sort of event the department trains for.
“We’re a snow-fighting organization that picks up trash to keep busy,” he said.
All of this is likely to make this a costly winter for the department. The 2026 fiscal year budget for the Sanitation Department is about $2.2 billion, excluding pensions and fringe benefits, which add another $1.4 billion.
The snow budget is $98.3 million, and the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan think tank, said it wouldn’t be surprised to see this blizzard add $200 million to that budget, based on historical city spending trends.
New York City’s snow budget is set through a formula in the city’s charter, and is typically the average of money spent on responding to snowstorm for the previous five years.
But the last few years haven’t been so snowy, so this year the budget of nearly $100 million is certain to fall short of what’s needed, according to the commission.
The city will need to allocate funds for overtime not just for the Sanitation Department, but also the police and transportation departments.
“You spend the money, try to do it as effectively as possible, and after the fact you try to figure out the math,” said Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission.
The blizzard, the biggest snowstorm New York has seen since 2016, is something of a test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose administration has scrambled to announce new initiatives to get the snow cleared out.
Harry Nespoli, the retired president of the city’s sanitation union, said New Yorkers can make the job of sanitation workers easier by staying indoors.
“There were times when I was on the trucks that I used to turn down the block and there’s a car stuck in the middle,” he said. “All that does is block up that street from being cleared.”
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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