Not only are we stranded, there are elderly people who my teenagers had to dig their wy to to check on heir welfare. I'm a caregiver for mentally challenged people and haven't been able to get to them or a grocery store.

If your street has not been plowed AT ALL, that is, even one pass for emergency vehicles, please call the Emergency Operations Center directly at 203-946-8221 and let them know. If busy, keep trying. They need to get that "one pass" on all of the streets before they can start the widening process and letting folks dig out their cars. Emergency vehicle access is still first priority. The City estimates that all City streets will be plowed at least once by Tuesday afternoon.

Our snow emergency work has been completed. If your snow issue hasn't been addressed, please reopen or resubmit with more information to SeeClickFix. Thanks for your patience.

Issue is not CLOSED! There was one pass on Young Street and cars and people are still stranded because of this. Repeatedly, we all moved our cars as the police came through with bull horns, three times, and yet NO SECOND PASS! Please reopen this issue, is is not resolved.

Our emergency snow work has been completed. If you snow issue hasn't been addressed please reopen or resubmit with more information to SeeClickFix. We continue cleaning up from storm. Thanks for your patience.

Street is not plowed, do not close this until it is done. One pass, roughly is all that happened, it needs to be plowed!

Thanks for reopening. We are continuing clean up and pulling together areas.

We are closing snow issues. Our crew has been reassigned to other maintenance issues such as potholes and bulk trash. Thanks.

SO almost a month after the request with absolutely no action on your part you close it? Terrible job you are doing, there was huge mounds of snow all over the street for the past MONTH with NO action at all on your part. You were waiting for the weather to change or Spring? This feels like the city doesn't care, and that see click fix is a deeply flawed system. If you have any intergrity at all, reply to this and explain to the many neighborhoods all over new haven that had to deal with NO PLOWING for the past month. Explain or apologize to the seniors and handicapped citizens of this good city why you could not plow their street fully, leaving giant mounds for them to dangerously navigate! It's a disgrace of giant proportions, and a the taxpayers should be protesting this.

@Brainard -

I understand your frustration, but this isn't the appropriate forum for such a conversation.

SeeClickFix is a platform for both citizens and cities to report and resolve non-emergency issues. If you have an emergency, it is important to contact the appropriate authorities (as was suggested earlier on this post).

Additionally, political discussions determined to be outside of our terms of service are not permitted, nor is SeeClickFix really the best place for it.

Again, I understand your frustration but this issue should be marked as Closed as the snow is, presumably, no longer there.

@ben - I am a citizen, and if the see click fix system isnt working and issues were not resolved, isn't this the forum for it? This is not a political discussion, but as a user of this seeclickfix system I want to know why it didn't work and the problem was never addressed? Is that inappropriate to ask? WHy should I continue to use seeclickfix if requests are never addressed?

I agree with Brainard here. His post didn't seem political at all, in fact he made some good points. As much as the actual issue was a major concern, the fact that the issue was closed TWICE when it had not actually be resolved is just wrong.

I agree with Brainard Carey and DChec. As much as I appreciate you understanding our frustration which is completely irrelevant to the actual fact of what is happening here, which is that the case was CLOSED TWICE even before being addressed. So Brainard questioning if this method of reporting does really work is pretty understandable and beyond frustration at this point. It is just a simple matter of knowing if in the future trying to solve issues this way will be worth our time or not.

Just to clarify: if it sounded like I expressed opinion about any of the feelings here, or the issue being closed when there still might've been a problem, it was unintentional. I wanted to add some definition to what SeeClickFix is really here for--a platform for reporting issues. Unfortunately sometimes those issues are not resolved, or not in a way deemed satisfactory.

We welcome positive discussion about how both communities & SeeClickFix can improve. At this point, however, the snow is (presumably) gone and hence the issue should be Closed. Reopening the issue to ask for an apology falls outside the scope of the platform.

@ben OK, thank you , lets have a positive discussion about how seeclickfix can improve! I called the emergency numbers you had posted and nothing ever happened. How can we help seeclickfix to improve? We want our neighborhood recognized as well as our emergencies, and of course we want to be positive! :) SO tell us all, what can we do to avoid the lack of response from seeclickfix in the future and can you explain why iour issue was never adressed so we may all understand how the wonderful system of seeclickfix works? What happens and how can we help seeclickfix to address our issues in a timely way?

@Brainard -

For starters, SeeClickFix doesn't "handle" these issues in the sense that we control what city resources do. We facilitate the city receiving reports from citizens. Unfortunately cities only have a certain amount of resources--particularly during an emergency--and sometimes things do go unresolved. I'm sorry this happened on Young Street.

In most cases, the first advice I would give is try the emergency numbers that Chris Heitmann had already helpfully posted during the issue. If that didn't elicit response, I would a) post that information back here, and b) keep calling.

At this point I'd like to mention that if the issue *does* get Closed during this time, before there is any resolution, you are absolutely right to reopen it--as you did the first two times.

If you feel like things aren't getting anywhere, always feel free to get in touch with SeeClickFix directly. During Nemo, we actually had special resources set up to help people get help--from allowing citizens to get notified specifically when their neighbors needed help, partnering with Neighbors for Neighbor, and even some of the team here heading out ourselves to lend a hand: http://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/2013/02/lend-your-neighbor-hand.html .

Again, I really do wish your issue had been resolved and apologies for the long reply.

it bears mentioning that you could also try contacting your alderperson to advocate for situations like these getting resolved in your neighborhood more efficiently in the future.

@juli - thank you - for the record, I called my alderman right at the beginning (Brian) he said he understood and was working on it, so.....

@Brainard Carey and other residents of Young Street. I'm the City's Chief Administrative Officer, and I want to apologize that the City was unable to clear your street to the standards you would like to see and normally expect in a snow storm, and give a little explanation of what we faced.

In a normal storm with 10 to 20 inches of snow, we divide the City into 22 main snow routes with a big plow truck responsible for about 12 miles of road. Given that many roads have more than one lane, the slow spead a plow has to drive and going back to the garage for gas and material, you can expect a plow truck to pass by your house every 2-4 hours. After the snow stops, therefore, you get a first pass within that time period, then a second, third, etc. until the road is well-plowed.

This storm was 34 inches - the most since 1888 - and our plow trucks are physically incapable of plowing that much snow. The only way to clear roads is with a payloader - big heavy machinery with 4-5 foot tires. The City only owns 4 payloaders because we only get this much snow every century, so we had to hire outside contractors. We ended up hiring about 25 additional payloaders and spent over $2.5 million on storm operations (we'll get about $750,000 back from the federal government, possibily a little more).

Our first priority was a single path down every street to provide emergency vehicle access, then widening main travel roads so the back-ups did not impede emergency vehicles and the largest number of residents. After that, we did try to go back to as many streets as possible and widen them a little and remove major mounds particularly by intersections. Even with 25-29 payloaders, however, the cost and time of this part of the operation was huge and we ultimately suspended full-scale operations after a week. A week after the storm, we reduced operations to address only locations that either police officers, firefighters or the Board of Education people who were responsible for getting children to school identified as safety issues.

There is a major difference in the City's ability to respond to storms of less than two feet and the once-in-a-century type storm we saw last month, and we have to make tough decisions about the appropriate amount of money to spend to achieve what level of clean-up. If that balance was off on your street, you have every right to be annoyed with us and I apologize. Even with the police and fire departments and feedback from the public providing status information, I am sure there are streets that we "over" cleaned, and some that we definitely under cleaned but we tried to reach the best balance possible.

- Rob Smuts