After record snowfall and resident fury, Mayor Mamdani surges 500 sanitation workers to the island’s hardest-hit streets
Staten Island Called It Abandonment. The Mayor Sent 500 Workers.
After a blizzard dropped more than two feet of snow on parts of Staten Island — and days of mounting resident fury about streets that remained impassable — Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Tuesday, February 25, that the Department of Sanitation had nearly tripled its snow removal force on the island to 500 personnel, adding 210 workers and significant additional equipment to an effort that many residents had characterized as woefully inadequate.
The heaviest recorded totals on Staten Island included 29 inches in Grasmere, 27.8 inches in Todt Hill, and 27 inches in Dongan Hills, according to the National Weather Service. Those numbers placed the February 2026 storm among the most severe in the island’s recorded history, creating drifts that blocked emergency access routes and left residents of side streets cut off for days after the primary arteries had been cleared.
Residents: “We’re the Forgotten People”
“We had neighbors reaching out to our congress people last night and council people. They’re with us and they’re saying the same thing: Staten Island’s been abandoned, but nothing is being done,” one resident told NY1. Another summed up the borough’s perennial feeling of neglect: “We’re like the forgotten people here.” These sentiments are not new in a borough that has long complained about receiving less city investment in infrastructure, transit, and emergency services than the other four boroughs. But the scale of the February storm brought that frustration to a boil in a way that was impossible for City Hall to ignore.
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella joined the chorus, directing his criticism at city officials rather than rank-and-file sanitation workers. When the administration responded with the surge, Fossella acknowledged the reversal. “Ultimately, our voices were heard, and as a result, the City will be assigning more than double the number of Sanitation personnel and vehicles here to get things back to normal,” he said in a statement. He also secured a commitment from the Mamdani administration to meet with Staten Island officials after the storm to identify where the response had fallen short and develop a better playbook for future events.
The Geography Problem
Storm response on Staten Island is genuinely harder than in the other boroughs. The island’s topography — steeply pitched residential streets, dead ends, and curves that make plowing difficult — combined with its distance from DSNY depots in the rest of the city create structural challenges that no surge of equipment can fully overcome in real time. As of Tuesday afternoon, the city said 99.2 percent of all roadways had received at least one pass from clearing equipment — but residents and local officials argued that metric obscured the reality of streets still packed with dangerous ice and drift.
The NYC Department of Sanitation deploys hundreds of vehicles and thousands of workers citywide during major snow events, but the allocation across boroughs has historically been a source of complaint from outer-borough communities. Research on municipal service equity consistently finds that boroughs with less political clout receive slower response times and fewer resources during emergencies — a pattern that advocates have been pushing every mayoral administration for decades to correct.
The Mamdani Response: Acknowledgment and Action
What set the administration’s handling of the Staten Island situation apart from previous administrations’ worst moments was the mayor’s willingness to publicly acknowledge the problem without defensiveness. “As we continue to respond to this blizzard, we are aware that narrow, hilly streets and tight corners on Staten Island were some of the areas hardest hit by the storm,” Mamdani said at a press conference. He described the combined effect of high snowfall and strong winds as creating “large snow drifts across the island” that required a targeted response beyond citywide operations.
The mayor’s approach during the storm — frequent public briefings, direct acknowledgment of shortfalls, and resource surges when complaints escalated — reflects a governing style that prizes transparency over spin. Whether that style will translate into durable improvements in how the city serves Staten Island, or whether the commitments made during the storm will fade once the news cycle moves on, is a question residents and borough officials will be watching closely. The Staten Island Borough President’s Office has said it will hold the administration to its promise of a post-storm review and strategic planning session.
For residents tracking future storm response across all five boroughs, the city’s real-time plow tracking tool is available at NYC Snow Portal. The National Weather Service’s New York regional forecast office provides storm tracking and precipitation data for the metro area.
