Althouse: "Even the dead can't escape the ineptitude of the city's Sanitation Department."

January 5, 2011

"Even the dead can't escape the ineptitude of the city's Sanitation Department."

"Sanitation crews dumped tons of dirty snow from the Christmas-weekend blizzard into the city's biggest Jewish cemetery, toppling 21 gravestones and wrecking an iron fence."

35 comments:

The Crack Emcee said...: It was on purpose,...; 1/5/11, 10:06 AM
cubanbob said...: The city needs to file chapter 9 and just get out of the union contracts.; 1/5/11, 10:09 AM
Ann Althouse said...: At least it wasn't a Christian cemetery on Christmas. Or a Jewish cemetery on Yom Kippur. Give these garbagemen some credit for sensitivity.; 1/5/11, 10:15 AM
Unknown said...: Now, they've done it.

They've gotten God mad at them.

And, on that side of the fence, the word, smite, gets used a lot.

WV "harsh" (no kidding) God's mood toward the union right about now.; 1/5/11, 10:15 AM
Larry J said...: Sounds like a hate crime to me.; 1/5/11, 10:16 AM
Ann Althouse said...: What do you think? Should we start calling them garbagemen again... instead of "sanitation workers"? A little revenge... Or is that low?; 1/5/11, 10:16 AM
Wince said...: "Look for... the union label."; 1/5/11, 10:18 AM
Anonymous said...: "Should we start calling them garbagemen again... instead of "sanitation workers"?

No, Ann, we should be calling them what they are: union scumbags; 1/5/11, 10:19 AM
Phil 314 said...: Boy this brings back a memory. I was living in Chicago during the great blizzard of 1978. A friend of mine lived in Lincoln Park and he drove an old "beater" to school daily. One morning after the blizzard his car was gone. He supposed that someone stole the cheap vehicle for parts.

Well in the spring after much of the snow had melted he took a stroll through Lincoln Park and lo and behold, there was his car!

He surmised that it had been moved to a side street (he had parked it on a snow route) and then buried under snow. Unlike these vehicles, his still ran and provided continued cheap transportation.; 1/5/11, 10:19 AM
Trooper York said...: My brother in law is a NYC sanitation worker and they have a dirty job. Yeah yeah I know they are union scumbags but they do get the shaft compared to the cops and the fireman. All of the union activist guys who did this should get fired. And they should break all the public employee unions especially the teachers union. But nobody has the balls to do that.
Nobody has the balls to fire them all like Calvin Coolidge or Ronals Reagan. So you can stop yapping about it and push the garbage over to your neighbors house.; 1/5/11, 10:38 AM
Trooper York said...: Besides how do we know that it was the garbage men who dumped all that garbage on the Jews.

Has anyone seen Cedarford lately?; 1/5/11, 10:39 AM
MadisonMan said...: (From the quoted article:) But when an accident happens of this caliber, you expect some form of accountability

Oh, that'll happen. NOT.; 1/5/11, 10:39 AM
Trooper York said...: They are not going to fire someone for doing their job. Shit happens.; 1/5/11, 10:43 AM
Trooper York said...: Last year they buried a kid in a crosswalk. Luckily someone saw it and dug the kid out before she croaked.; 1/5/11, 10:44 AM
Trooper York said...: The great thing about the sanitation department is that they managed to bury Nanny Bloomberg.; 1/5/11, 10:45 AM
holdfast said...: Imagine if it had been a Muslim cemetery. Bloomberg would have been back on his knees in front of CAIR in a jiffy.; 1/5/11, 10:55 AM
MikeR said...: Interesting. I used to live right near there (in the '90s); that's a really old cemetery. The only chief rabbi that New York ever had, Rabbi Jacob Joseph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Joseph) is said to be buried there, though I was never able to find anyone who knew where.
Anyhow, that cemetery was in incredibly bad repair. The old sections were just ignored. I used to walk by on Ocean Parkway (the story says the snow pileup was on 22 Ave/Bay Parkway.) You could see fallen headstones all over the place. Disgraceful. I don't know if anyone was responsible for its upkeep.
I wonder if they can really tell if the headstones were knocked over by the snow, or were down already.; 1/5/11, 11:05 AM
Trooper York said...: It is correct that this cemetary is almost totally abandoned. It's sad really. There are several cemetarie much like it in NYC. Where no one living has a memory of the people buried there. The upkeep and maintenance is nil as the organizers and owners have gone bankrupt. So what do you do? Plow it over and build something new?; 1/5/11, 11:20 AM
Trooper York said...: Even as famous a place as Greenword in Brooklyn has a problem with maintenance on its fringes. Kids comming in and knocking over tombstones. Garbage and beer cans and what not.; 1/5/11, 11:23 AM
Trooper York said...: There is a stop on the F line that when you get off you are in the middle of the cemetary. Graves huddled together so closely you can't believe it. It looks so shabby and weird and scary. And that's in the daytime.; 1/5/11, 11:24 AM
Trooper York said...: This was a cemetary for poor people who lived a long time ago. Nobody remembers. Sad to say, nobody really cares.

Dust to dust.; 1/5/11, 11:25 AM
CatherineM said...: Trooper, I am sure most are good guys. However, it's a good job with excellent benfits and you can't put it on the same level as police and firefighters. Yet, they get to retire after 20 years (like cops and firefighters) and make a mint in retirement. If you start at 20 and retire at 40 you get a great annual salary and full health benefits AND can work at something else. I swear, I would have become a city employee if I knew this when I was 20. No one in the private sector gets these kinds of benefits. That's what is eating away at the budget.

Here is an excellent article.http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0104ng.html

When he took office in 2002, Gotham spent $1.3 billion annually on the Department of Sanitation. Today, the city spends more than $2.2 billion on “New York’s Strongest.” That increase during Bloomberg’s tenure was almost three and a half times the inflation rate. Yet, we have fewer employees. It's all in retirement benefits.; 1/5/11, 11:27 AM
Trooper York said...: Of course it is in retirement bennies. I am all for going after them and changing the requirments to make them work 30 years to be able to retire. But the sanit guys get a bad rap. It is a tough job and I have a lot of respect for them Just sayn.; 1/5/11, 11:45 AM
virgil xenophon said...: FWIW (and GOD I hold no brief for unionized city "sanitation engineers"--workers, garbage-men or otherwise) garbage collection crews nation-wide have historically had FAR higher rates of serious on-the-job injury--as opposed to deaths--than do their police & fire counterparts.; 1/5/11, 12:18 PM
Trooper York said...: That is very true. I think they might be the one group who actually should get more money for what they do.

They should take the money from the teachers and give it to the garbagemen.

It is pretty much the same job after all.; 1/5/11, 12:28 PM
Unknown said...: Agree with Ann and Florida on the label thing.

Trooper York said...

They are not going to fire someone for doing their job. Shit happens.

But this is snow, after all.

And the issue is they weren't doing their jobs. This is incompetence - or arrogance - pure and simple.

The fact that nobody gets fired is also why unions, as they exist today, are doing a lot to drag down the country.; 1/5/11, 12:41 PM
knox said...: make them work 30 years to be able to retire

?

We should all be so lucky. Don't must of us start working full-time by at least 21 and work until we are at least 65? Us younguns don't even expect to get any Social Security, so retirement is increasingly far-off.; 1/5/11, 12:55 PM
Known Unknown said...: It is correct that this cemetary is almost totally abandoned. It's sad really. There are several cemetarie much like it in NYC. Where no one living has a memory of the people buried there. The upkeep and maintenance is nil as the organizers and owners have gone bankrupt. So what do you do? Plow it over and build something new?

Did you not see Poltergeist?; 1/5/11, 1:32 PM
Trooper York said...: Did you not know that Bloomberg is an evil real estate developer?; 1/5/11, 1:34 PM
Trooper York said...: He would clear that site for a condo development just like he did for Willets Point.; 1/5/11, 1:34 PM
Phil 314 said...: Boy this brings back a memory....

FYI this comment was referring to the video clip of cars buried in the linked article, NOT the Jewish cemetery.; 1/5/11, 1:45 PM
Alex said...: What if they had done does on an Indian burial ground?; 1/5/11, 1:49 PM
Rialby said...: Maybe the Jews of NY will finally see fit to a party that never has their best interests at heart.; 1/5/11, 3:27 PM
Rialby said...: Missing: vote against; 1/5/11, 3:28 PM
JAL said...: The guys who should be fired are the guys who pulled the front end loader backwards into the SUV ramming it into the car in front of it. But the SUV was a city vehicle, so who cared, right?

Dragging the front end loader across the top was a touching finale.

NO private tow truck operator could possibly get away with that.

But they will, because they are union. Inexcusable.

If I were the insurance company I would draw a few lines here.; 1/5/11, 6:18 PM