Blizzard to Blanket City With Up to Two Feet, Mamdani Deploys Plows and Warming Buses

As New York braces for a perilous blizzard, its response will test both its infrastructural resilience and social compact.

Were it not for the city’s skyline retreating behind a curtain of white, New Yorkers might be forgiven for doubting the National Weather Service’s latest warning. Yet, the prediction is unequivocal: between 16 and 24 inches of snow—nearly two feet—is expected to blanket New York City between Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. In meteorologically tepid winters, such numbers would have seemed eccentric. In 2026, they portend citywide disruption and pose graver questions about urban preparedness.

From 1 p.m. on February 22nd until 6 p.m. the following day, the city will enter what officials describe as a “prolonged period of heavy snow and gale-force winds.” The NWS forecasts gusts up to 60 mph, with whiteout conditions rendering visibility puny, at times below a quarter of a mile. Officials are blunt: travel should be reserved for emergencies, and New Yorkers should expect both power outages and snarled transit.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has positioned his administration front and centre. As of Saturday, the Department of Sanitation has readied over 2,200 vehicles and 700 salt spreaders—a formidable arsenal geared toward keeping the city’s 6,300 miles of roads navigable. City Hall maintains that, unlike smaller municipalities, their response is coordinated across all five boroughs and buttressed by real-time data from Notify NYC.

The disruption, if forecasts prove accurate, promises to be far from trivial. With schools on the cusp of shifting to remote learning and most non-essential travel suspended, yet another iteration of pandemic-era routines—laptops in kitchens, parents juggling work and childcare—may be thrust back upon families. New York’s public school system, the nation’s largest, serves 900,000 students, and administrative dithering over closures or virtual transitions can impose real costs on working parents and hourly staff.

The city’s most vulnerable residents—those without stable shelter—are expected to fare worst. After last month’s historic snowstorm, which saw a spike in deaths among unhoused people exposed to the bitter cold, scrutiny of the Mamdani administration’s measures has intensified. The mayor’s imposition of a “code blue” on Saturday mandates that anyone seeking shelter must be accommodated; by Tuesday morning, officials promise expanded outreach, 22 warming buses, 11 hospital sites, and emergency access at 13 schools. It is a paltry but crucial cushion in the face of freezing weather.

Hungry for points on political competence, Mr Mamdani has been quick to frame the response as not merely reactive but systematic. “Our city doesn’t wait for a crisis to act—we organize, we prepare, and we take care of each other,” he declared, echoing a line from his address after last month’s storm. Yet, last year’s well-praised snow clearance was soon overshadowed by mounting complaints about the plight of the homeless—a stark reminder that moving plows is not the same as safeguarding lives.

Economically, these storms levy significant costs. The expenses of pre-emptive salting, overtime for sanitation workers, and lost productivity in a city with a $1.3 trillion GDP are difficult to quantify in real time. After the 2016 blizzard, city agencies estimated a direct outlay of over $100 million. For a city already contending with labyrinthine budgets and post-pandemic deficits, such sums are hardly trifling.

New Yorkers’ famed resilience, while a cherished trope, faces bitter tests in these conditions. Essential workers—transit operators, nurses, delivery drivers—will shoulder the brunt of risk, while more affluent professionals can just swap dress shirts for pyjamas and commute to meetings via Zoom. Snow removal and warming centre access, as always, are not distributed equally across neighbourhoods. The blizzard thus exposes, yet again, the city’s persistent spatial and class cleavages.

A climate of unpredictability

These storms, rare as they once seemed, have grown capriciously frequent and intense. The metro area’s infrastructure, from above-ground power grids to century-old subway tunnels, was not built for this volatility. National comparisons are instructive. Boston, battered by similar blizzards in 2015, spent heavily to modernise its snow response; Oslo invests in underground transmission lines to blunt wind-induced outages. New York’s model—reactive, politically visible, but fundamentally aged—has endured but may soon seem overdue for overhaul.

Looking west, Chicago’s response to winter hazards is a paragon of technocratic organisation; public warming shelters operate on fixed schedules, and proactive notification systems alert residents before the first flakes land. European capitals—Stockholm and Berlin foremost among them—take shelter obligations as a baseline, not a contingency. New York still designates “code blue” events as exceptional, not as a threshold for a decent society.

On balance, the Mamdani administration’s operational readiness bodes well. Its embrace of digital communications, interagency cooperation, and transparent updates marks a clear improvement over the erratic performances of past decades. But technocratic prowess can only go so far when underlying vulnerabilities—aging grids, chronic homelessness, and a highly stratified urban fabric—remain unresolved.

Society’s tolerance for disruption is not infinite. Each storm amplifies frustrations with city services, exposes gaps in safety nets, and forces trade-offs between public safety and economic continuity. New Yorkers, for all their stoic humour, will judge leaders as much by what happens the week after the snow melts as by the speed of plowing on the worst night.

Whether this blizzard constitutes a singular event or the new normal, one trend is clear: cities with patchwork approaches to extreme weather are unlikely to thrive. Climate unpredictability may soon demand as much attention from mayors as economic development, public safety, or housing affordability.

As snow cloaks Manhattan’s towers and silences the city’s ceaseless din, New York’s vaunted resilience faces its perennial audit. How it responds—and whom it protects first—will matter not just this weekend but in all those to come. ■