The cleanup from the Blizzard of 2013 continues today as town schools, government offices and the Hamden Public Library are closed to allow the Public Works Department to continue to remove the 40" of snow that fell between Friday and Saturday.
With today's school closure, the April vacation is eliminated, Supt. of Schools Fran Rabinowitz said.
"We are closed tomorrow which "eats up" the last day of April vacation," she said in an email Sunday.
The district used up its snow days between Super Storm Sandy last fall, several snow days this winter and now the blizzard, which has so far closed school last Friday and today. A decision will be made today as to whether school will open Tuesday.
The district's April vacation was scheduled for April 15-19. The February vacation is next week.
Public Works crews have worked 24/7 since Friday to clear the roads, town officials said. There were 10 crews working Sunday throughout town and 16 additional payloaders from out of state were scheduled to arrive last night, Chief Administrative Assistant Curt Balzano Leng said.
As of Sunday night, 40 percent of the town's roads remained impassable, Leng said.
By the way, if they had a plan from the beginning and plowed throughout the night this massive snow removal wouldn’t have happened. Poor Planning – as usual since the gov again proves themselves inefficient and incompetent. It seems these town employees are so over worked byt the last paragraph. Really?What a joke.
This sentence was taken from Mayor Jackson’s automated telephone call to Hamden residents last night. “The amount and rate of snowfall during the blizzard made regular plowing alone impossible, because there is simply no place to push the snow without hopelessly burying driveways and sidewalks.” Those above words from Mayor Jackson are truly funny, because even with pay-loaders cleaning snow from Hamden roads, Hamden residents are still hopelessly removing snow from their driveways those pay-loaders pushed into their driveways. Let us say the snow fell at 6 inches and hour and it took the snowplow 2 hours to do its neighborhood route. The snowplow would be dealing with 12 inches of snow every 2 hours not 40 inches of snow at one time, continues plowing would have been better. Maybe the L/C should investigate if what Mayor Jackson said is a lame excuse for incompetence or Hamden’s Emergency Management Plan needs to be improved.
The problem here is that this mayor and his phony people don't rally care. They are pulling the wool over our eyes . Leng wants to be mayor. No way, he should go back to comic books since he is a joke. Our Snow removers can' get down our street since the plows never got here to open the street up to traffic. Didn't think I would be complaint about this situation but three days of being stuck and unable to use any exits from our house is enough.
Last year when the calendar was proposed for this school year I made a recommendation to alter the calendar to avoid this kind of scenario. Ideally you would build a calendar with 185 days of instruction. Also you take two week at the Christmas holiday and only take Good Friday and Easter Monday in the Spring for breaks. I remember that schedule from my time in the rural Midwest and they still use it rather extensively. The benefit to this is that when you use a snow day you pluck initially from one of the extra five days built in on the back end. If you end up with no snow days then you get an extra five days of instruction. I understand the issues around the kids not being in school as I have one at every level myself. There is no doubt that this scenario is placing alot of strain on parents, especially the ones who need to head to work and may not have care lined up for their children. The only thing I can say is that I will continue to push for changes to the calendar going forward.
Oh, and by the way, a payloader just opened my street (Monday at 9AM)...thanks PW for all the hard work and thanks Mayor Jackson.
In general the regular Board meetings are the second Tuesday of the month at 7pm at the Central Office.
Tom, Sure. I would like to see two weeks off at Christmas and only Good Firday and the Monday after Easter. That is what I grew up with in the Midwest. We started school mid-August and were done mid to late May. I hope that helps clarify.