Some storm forecasts develop predictably, their general contours discernible from five days out. Others take shape almost all at once, as disparate weather models converge on a likely, perilous outcome.
That is what happened in New York City late last week, as officials watched forecasts escalate from predictions of a “potential offshore storm” on Thursday afternoon to projections of “impactful snowfall” on Friday morning to a Saturday pre-dawn warning of a blizzard.
“It just kept going up and up and up,” Christina Farrell, the city’s new emergency management commissioner, recalled on Tuesday, as snow plows traversed the city and New Yorkers waded through piles of slush.
Zohran Mamdani, who in his eight-week-old mayoralty has contended with two unusually grave winter storms, called this weekend’s weather the “snowstorm of the decade,” and he may be right.
Preliminary numbers from New York State suggest that some city neighborhoods set records for single-day snowfalls. Fordham, in the Bronx, saw 22.6 inches of snow, nearly four inches more than the previous Bronx record of 19 inches, which was set in 2006. In Todt Hill on Staten Island, 27.8 inches fell, eight inches more than the Staten Island record of 19.5 inches set in 2016.
The storm came just weeks after an unusual cold spell enveloped the five boroughs in a frigid, weekslong embrace, accompanied by nearly a foot of snow. At least 20 people were found dead or dying in the cold, and some New Yorkers wondered if Mr. Mamdani could have done more to protect homeless people.
This storm offered the mayor something of a reset.
Last Wednesday, as the first deputy mayor and top agency officials were holding a review of the city’s storm response, emergency management officials flagged the possibility of snow during the coming weekend, a senior administration official said, but said the models indicated it would be relatively insignificant.
The forecast soon worsened. And at around 2:45 p.m. on Friday, the deputy mayor for operations, Julia Kerson, interrupted an unrelated meeting at City Hall to tell the mayor that the city could see substantial snowfall over the weekend, the senior official said.
That evening, Mr. Mamdani urged staff members to apply the lessons they learned from the past storm, and he emphasized the need to communicate aggressively about the snow.
Before long, the mayor’s message was populating newspapers, city Wi-Fi kiosks and social media.
He proceeded to implement several policies that the city had experimented with over the course of the last storm but did not put in place at its beginning.
This time, from the start, the city sent out ambulettes to deliver warm-weather supplies to people living outside, rapidly made new emergency shelter beds available and kept overdose prevention centers open all night, a city spokesman said.
As of Tuesday, no outdoor deaths had been reported — perhaps a result of those policies, perhaps of the comparatively balmy double-digit temperatures, or perhaps both.
On Saturday, the Hochul administration reached out to New York City and its surrounding counties and suggested a travel ban, two state officials said, something Ms. Farrell said the city had also been contemplating. On Sunday, Mr. Mamdani implemented one, barring most vehicles during the heart of the storm for what Ms. Farrell said was first time since the blizzard of 2016.
Officials also discussed whether to shut down the subway, according to the state officials, as then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did in 2015 ahead of a storm that ended up largely bypassing the city. Mr. Cuomo’s decision prompted substantial blowback.
But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was confident that the system could operate, and soon it was moving subway cars from train yards and onto sheltered express tracks, so that the snow would not impede their deployment the next day.
On Monday, the M.T.A. documented trips by 830,000 subway riders, many presumably New Yorkers who could not work from home. Some 200,000 riders took buses equipped with chains, an M.T.A. spokesman said.
In 12-hour shifts, sanitation workers cleared the snow and sprinkled 143 million pounds of salt on city streets. More than 1,200 emergency shovelers cleared crosswalks. After a rare snow day on Monday, schools reopened on Tuesday. Attendance appears to have been well below normal, with a preliminary attendance rate of 62.8 percent, compared to a typical rate of roughly 90 percent.
The storm response was not without hiccups.
There were apparent communication lapses among numerous entities serving homeless people. Staten Island officials erupted into complaints about the relative slowness of plowing, which sanitation officials attributed to the borough’s narrow, hilly streets and tight corners.
Thousands of people temporarily lost power in the Rockaways. The subway was afflicted with delays. In Washington Square Park, police officers were pelted with snowballs, and the mayor said that he believed two came away with lacerations on their face.
On Tuesday, Donovan Richards, the Queens borough president who had been critical of the mayor’s response to the previous storm, held a Zoom call with about 100 leaders from around the borough. There were complaints about inadequately shoveled bus stops, among other things, he said.
But overall, compared to the previous storm, the city’s response to this one was “10 times better,” Mr. Richards said.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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