Peter King went first to Big Sis for an answer
 

You might think it strange, but I find it somewhat encouraging.

Peter King is looking into the issues with international flights being held on tarmacs for hours and hours in the NYC area during the recent snow storm. The first person he asked for an explanation was Big Sis. Of course, she said that the delays in processing incoming passengers was not the fault of DHS/CBP, but in the interview I heard, he was not buying that totally, which I see as encouraging.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...-flight-delays

There were several interviews on the television news containing commentary from passengers from international flights, all saying that they were told they could not get off the plane because there was nobody staffing the CBP counters.

If that's true, it's great news 'cause it's another nail in Big Sis' coffin!

http://www.examiner.com/airlines-air...trip-from-hell

Overall, it doesn't look like Customs was the major bottleneck - but coming in on the tail end of a "hellish" flight, it looks pretty inexcusable. There's no possible excuse for DHS/CBP to have failed to know that the flight was waiting on them.

As much as I would like to lay the blame at the feet of Napolitano, my guess is this is a case of a bad situation that ALL of the service providers at JFK weren't equipped to handle. PA personnel and snow equipment probably weren't able to keep up. Ground crews were more than likely very short staffed. With large portions of NYC mass transit down people probably weren't able to even get in to handle snow/aircraft, etc, ad nauseam. Ultimately it was probably a case of not being to get an airplane off a gate more than anything else.

One would think CBP would be able to design a procedure around not being able to get an aircraft on an international gate but I would be surprised if even they weren't horribly short staffed, in which case it simply may not be feasible to design a procedure to handle.

I would put the blame on the Port Authority.

I've seen interview after interview with their spokesperson and his story changes by the hour.

Have also heard the Port Authority has been harassing media, i.e. not allowing them inside JFK to take pictures or talk to pax, and keeping most media outside in the snow.

On a personal note, I've had problems with the Port Authority and taking photography at JFK as a tourist. The Port Authority can be difficult to deal with and is full of bureaucratic fiefdoms.

How were they supposed to get in to work, when many subways still weren't running & many buses were stranded in the deep snow?

CBP workers are people, too -- they also go to work in the morning just like everyone else, at least when it's possible to get there.

Great.....One blowhard asks another blowhard or an answer :rolleyes:

The problem is that the NY blowhard asked the DHS blowhard and should have known better and asked the blowhards at the NY Port Authority first. Sheesh-what a putz.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8830/4.5.0.138 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

If a certain percentage of the JFK customs people are designated as "essential personnel," they are REQUIRED to be present for duty. Yes, they sign an agreement. Tough beans - that's what cots and frozen burritos are for.

I've got a solution for this problem. Just fix some rooms up at the airport for CBP workers to stay in and when a big snowstorm is coming that is going to cause what happened this time. They can call in some CBP workers to come in before the storm hits and they can stay at the airport. Then CBP workers will already be available there when a flight comes in and the passengers need to get off the plane.

Indeed. When Colorado Springs gets several feet of snow, the various military installations will post to local TV stations whether they are closed and whether essentially personnel are nonetheless required to show up. I've never seen essential personnel excluded, even for the Air Force Academy.

That's called "contingency planning," and Napolitano and Pistole (and their cronies/underlings) have proven horribly inept at it.

It's a completely different story in NYC. First, it may not have been CBP that was having major issues. Second, even if it was mostly a CBP issue you can require everything in the world, and if it is impossible for people to get in and impossible to get to those people to bring them in there is nothing you can do. Firing half your staff because they didn't show up for a storm in which half of the city's ambulances got stuck just isn't feasible. It's different in other areas because it's generally a case of emergency snow routes getting cleared and exempting "required" personnel from snow emergency rules. New York can be impossible in that scenario because it's so heavily dependent on transit and because in the case of this storm, the emergency routes weren't even getting cleared because of abandoned vehicles.

Oh, and if it wasn't CBP but rather PA or MTA or ground crew that screwed it up it will NEVER change. Unions own the NY state legislature and nothing regarding local government employees will change in the near future.

My suggestion is, next time NYC experiences a blizzard, Bloomberg should announce that abandoned vehicles won't be towed but carried by forklift or front-end loader and dumped in the east river. But then again, I'm an evil person

Going to Secretary Napolitano over tarmac delays when it's weather-related is like talking to the guy at Pizza Hut about warts.


Port Authority is going to have a mess on its hands over this. It will be part and parcel of the entire city's failure to handle the blizzard.

Part of this will go to the saying "the cover-up is worse than the crime."

Don't see how Napolitano can be faulted in regards to the Port Authority's handling of ground operations.

I disagree. To be considered "inept" you would first have to make an attempt at a given task. To day, I have yet to see anyone even try.