Mayor Rahm Emanuel will soon receive a report detailing the successes and failures of the city's response to the massive blizzard that crippled Chicago earlier this year.
"A lot of things were done right and [other] things need to be improved," Emanuel said Thursday following a tour of the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The Feb. 1 and 2 storm buried Lake Shore Drive, trapping some 530 cars on the road. Then-mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel demanded that City Hall "get to the bottom of what happened" and learn from its mistakes.
Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Tom Byrne said Thursday the postmortem gives a much more logistical, even military-style precision to when to close all or parts of Lake Shore Drive, and where to divert traffic if necessary.
"That section of the Drive got open in 36 hours, and we did a great job getting that done. We're gonna build on the successes that were out there and questions we think need to be answered." Bryne said.
After the closure of Lake Shore Drive, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley took some time out of the spotlight and let the department heads clean up the mess.
Some said that Daley was not able to face the music of the abandoned vehicles and closed Drive, while others contended that Daley was too angry and needed a day to cool off.
When Daley came out of hiding, he said that he had confidence in his department heads and, "This isn't the Daley show."
| Full Coverage: Blizzard of 2011 |
