After the storm, officials point fingers

City's timing, drivers, plowing, intensity of snow are blamed

Bo He and his 5-year-old daughter, Ellen, tried to stay under control as they slid at Jamaica Pond yesterday. (Globe Staff / David L. Ryan)

After the snowstorm: The blame game.

As Greater Boston residents continued to fume over the state and city response to a 10-inch snowfall that paralyzed the city, the region seethed with recriminations yesterday.

Stopped dead by a little snow?

First, Mayor Thomas M. Menino blamed the state's poor plowing. Then he blamed Hub employers for letting all their employees leave at the same time. Menino's rookie public works chief blamed conflicting weather forecasts.

And the mayor's probable reelection rival, Councilor Michael F. Flaherty, blamed the mayor for bungling the response and "passing the buck."

Governor Deval Patrick and his transportation aides blamed Mother Nature for what they called an unusually intense and front-loaded storm that rapidly went to whiteout conditions, snarling roads before plows could even get to work. Patrick also blamed employers for not sending their workers home earlier.

Still others said the blame lies with us: Those of us who didn't buy gas Thursday morning and conked out on the ride home. Those of us who pushed past stoplights into city intersections and triggered gridlock. All of us who decided to hit the road at once in early afternoon, instead of waiting out the storm.

"Those who are trying to point fingers should look in the rear-view mirror and point at themselves," said state Senator Steven A. Baddour, who heads the Legislature's Transportation Committee and endured a four-hour ride home to Methuen from Beacon Hill. "I think a lot of people were just not prepared. It's inexcusable to me that people ran out of gas. People should have been filling up in the morning."

Late yesterday, state Highway Department, city, and Turnpike Authority officials gathered for a "lessons learned" session aimed at launching an effort to make sure that the next weekday snowstorm doesn't tie the city in knots.

Numbers that emerged yesterday painted a picture of a storm that, while delivering less than one-third as much snow as the legendary Blizzard of 1978, inflicted some of the same transportation paralysis. Across Massachusetts, State Police ordered the towing of 728 vehicles abandoned by frustrated drivers. As many as 200 cars were reported abandoned on the Southeast Expressway. On the turnpike, the 12-minute ride from Natick to Weston at 1 p.m. became a 100-minute ride by 6 p.m. Toll takers reported taking half-hour breaks and seeing the same car stuck in front of their booth when they returned.

The Highway Department deployed 3,962 trucks, plows, and sanders across the state, the maximum available, many applying snow-melting salt up to two hours before the storm began. "I truly believe we got the fundamentals right," said Commissioner Luisa M. Paiewonsky.

Paiewonsky said the agency "would make maybe some tactical changes," such as asking trucking companies, as Connecticut does, to pull drivers off the road before a storm hits and advising people that if they have not hit the road before snow starts, to hold off and let plows begin working before they try to leave.

The gridlock trapped many students at schools in Boston, which unlike many other districts across the state did not end classes early. The last two of Boston's 56,000 public school students finally got home at 11:30 p.m. Thursday, said Superintendent Carol R. Johnson, who is experiencing her first Boston storm since coming to the post from Memphis.

Johnson said she didn't send students home early because many have working parents and would be unsupervised, but added, "I don't think any of us in the city anticipated the gridlock" that trapped school buses along with the rest of the city.

The fault for the chaos, Patrick said at a State House press conference yesterday, lies with businesses for failing to match his decision to send state employees home no later than 11:30 a.m. "The decisions that were made, particularly by private employers, were not to release as early as we would have liked," he said.

Menino noted critically that "it seemed like everybody decided yesterday at 1 p.m. to release their employees," which happened to be the same time he sent city workers home.

City officials blamed state officials for everything from being too slow to clear major arteries such as Storrow Drive and the Jamaicaway before traffic began backing up to troopers parking cruisers in traffic lanes.

"When times are difficult, it's only natural to look over the neighbor's fence and say, 'Hey, you should do this,' " said Boston Transportation Commissioner Thomas Tinlin.

Tinlin's boss, Dennis Royer, who was recruited from Denver last year to be Menino's public-works czar, said in hindsight that he wonders whether the city should have declared a snow emergency, which triggers parking bans on main arteries, earlier than 2 p.m.

But Royer said that many weather forecasts the night before predicted 4 to 8 inches, potentially less than the 6-inch minimum for declaring a snow emergency, and that only one said the storm could total 6 to 10. "We waited until the morning update, and by that time, everybody was saying, 'We think you might get more,' " Royer said.

Flaherty, an at-large city councilor and former council president who is likely to run for mayor in 2009, blasted Menino's administration. "They were forecasting it for days, and it hit exactly where and when they said," Flaherty said. "Why didn't we have better coordination, a better plan? We should own up to our shortcomings, take responsibility, and move forward with a better plan." Aides for Menino would not respond to Flaherty's remarks.

Thursday's chaos prompted talk at both City Hall and the State House and among business groups about the possibility of imposing a system of staggered dismissals at major employers, to spread out the rush hour as snow is coming. But Brian Gilmore - executive vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts, the state's biggest business lobby representing 7,000 employers - said such a plan would be hard to enforce.

"These institutions can't keep people from leaving if they want to," he said. "You can't blame people for wanting to go home."

The disastrous traffic also led some officials to question whether Boston was prepared to handle an evacuation in a terrorist strike. Menino and Peter Judge of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency insisted that if the city had been facing an evacuation, not a snowstorm, different procedures would have been followed.

"If a formal evacuation was in place, things would have been done differently," Judge said. "The coordinated response would have police at key traffic-control points. Gridlock wouldn't be occurring. Maybe an alternative would be sheltering in place, stay where you are, and take the appropriate precautionary steps at that location."

Not that it was any comfort to Massachusetts officials, but neighboring Rhode Island faced the same problem Thursday, with Providence students trapped at school and in school buses for up to six hours and with 200 cars stuck and abandoned. Governor Donald L. Carcieri, who was traveling in the Middle East when the storm arrived, vowed to investigate what his top aide called "an unprecedented traffic disaster."

Stephanie Ebbert, John R. Ellementm and Matthew Viser of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com., Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.