Nearly three days after the tri-state was hit with more than two feet of snow in a historic blizzard that left at least 17 people dead, plow trucks have passed over "99 percent" of streets in Queens
New York City Department of Sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garica said that plow trucks have rolled through the borough that had been inundated with as much as 34 inches of snow in places by Tuesday. But she stopped short of saying every street had been cleared. The news comes as other parts of the city, including Newark, continue to struggle with snow removal.
"I would like to stay with 99 percent because I'm sure you will all go find the one street I have missed," she told NBC 4 New York Tuesday.
She was right -- 85th Street in South Ozone Park was still impassable as of noon -- but conditions in the borough were a far cry from the grids of unplowed streets that were observed on Sunday and Monday.
Garcia and other city officials have pointed to the sheer volume of snow Queens received, along with its sometimes narrower streets, for the slow pace of snow removal. Officials say that plows were sent out as soon as they were available.
The department of sanitation noted that it moved nearly 100 million cubic yards of snow from city streets -- enough to fill the Empire State Building 24 times or Yankee Stadium a stunning 66 times. Roughly, the weekend blizzard dropped 702 million cubic yards of powder on the entire city, which would fill the iconic skyscraper 171 times and the home of the Bronx Bombers 468 times.
Residents had taken to social media with the hashtag #PlowQueens to show off how bad the streets were in areas like Woodhaven Woodside, Sunnyside and Maspeth. Other parts of the city have been largely cleared by this point, save sparse patches where snow piles have collapsed in the streets.
Queens wasn't the only area in the tri-state still feeling the pain. In Newark, roads were still caked with crunched down snow on Tuesday, and across more sparsely populated areas across the region, residents had to fight with unplowed roads.
