Seattle council blasts chaotic snow response

A new report on Seattle's snowstorm response questions the "overall level of emergency preparedness" at the city's Transportation Department, which doesn't have a formal structure for responding to emergencies.

The City Council review, issued Wednesday, shows the department did not have an emergency-response team ready, even though a city executive order requires it.

Just after the report's release, city officials announced they will hire an outside consultant to review the response to the December storms. A series of snowstorms rolled through Seattle over two weeks, and icy streets paralyzed the city.

Mismanagement and a lack of preparedness led to the city's poor performance, the report said, adding that because of incomplete record-keeping, "how many miles of residential streets [were plowed] and why they were plowed during the snowstorm cannot be confirmed or explained."

During the storms, Seattle transportation officials kept snowplowing records on dry-erase boards and in handwritten notes, and let road crews decide which streets to plow first, according to the report.

Also, the city did not follow its own procedures. A team of people was supposed to be ready to respond to road emergencies, but that team was not activated for the first week and a half of snow because it "did not formally exist," the report said.

Instead, the street-maintenance director managed the response "largely on his own."

The report describes confusion over procedures among Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) staff. Some senior staff may not have known that the department could request activation of the emergency-operations center, the report said. It went on to say that SDOT's communication with city emergency-operations center workers "did not seem to reflect the urgency or the actual state of SDOT's field operations."

City Transportation Director Grace Crunican did not return a message left for her Wednesday afternoon. Seattle City Councilmember Jan Drago, who chairs the council's transportation committee, also did not return a call.

"It just seems as though it was very disorganized," said Councilmember Tom Rasmussen. "The operational management, the dispatch and deployment operations, using this whiteboard, not tracking where the plows were going, where the sand was being distributed. ... People worked very hard, but it seemed very disorganized."

The report, prepared by council staff, was based on interviews and more than 1,000 pages of documents The Seattle Times requested for a series of February stories that detailed the city's failures during the December storms.

Mayor Greg Nickels, up for election this year, said at a December news conference that the city deserved a B for its efforts to clear the snow. His spokesman, Alex Fryer, said Wednesday that the mayor stands by that grade.

"Our way of talking about it was 'needs improvement,' and we're going to stand by 'needs improvement,' " Fryer said.

In a news release Wednesday, Nickels said he agreed with the council that an outside consultant was a good idea. "Our mutual goal is to ensure better response in weather emergencies, and that we have the skills and equipment to make that happen," he said.

Councilmember Tim Burgess said the city's response to the snowstorm calls into question its readiness for other types of emergency.

"It's not just about transportation and snow," he said. "It's about the city's overall emergency preparedness ... That's our job to make sure that we're ready for any eventuality."

The council report also questions the thoroughness of an after-action review the mayor submitted to the council in February. It says that report's contents "lack depth" and changes recommended by that review, including a reversal of the no-salt policy after a two-day review, were not based on a scientific analysis.

The City Council had been poised to accept the mayor's findings in February, but that vote was postponed after a Seattle Times investigation uncovered myriad problems. The Times' investigation showed the city rarely used all 27 of its plows at once, even after heavy snowfall.

The man calling the shots when storms rolled over the city -- street-maintenance director Paul Jackson Jr. -- had no experience directing a major snowstorm response.

Over two weeks, he orchestrated a disjointed response that found snowplow drivers hop-scotching around the city to help less experienced drivers and fill special requests, according to department records reviewed by The Times.

Truck driver Sione Kongaika, who recently retired after 31 years with the department, told The Times that Jackson was concerned about finding more plows to clear downtown streets so Nickels could get to work.

The council report says Jackson was calling the shots on his own for the first week and a half of snowy weather. But the department's inconsistent record system, and the absence of coherent real-time information, made it difficult for Jackson and other top managers to get a "big picture" view of events in the city at any given time during the storm.

"The reliance on the memory of individual staffers, archaic systems, and undocumented verbal reports and communication for real-time decision making appeared to present many challenges for orchestrating an organized, cohesive and coordinated snow response effort," the report noted.

Jackson couldn't be reached Wednesday because he was at a snow-response conference in Iowa, "to gain insight about new tactics and materials for responding to winter storms," according to SDOT spokesman Richard Sheridan.

Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com. Susan Kelleher: 206-464-2508 or skelleher@seattletimes.com