NYC Council members attack Mayor Adams’ response to wildfire smoke that enveloped city

Elected leaders continued to attack Mayor Adams and top city officials Wednesday for their response to the wildfire smoke that blew into New York City from Canada in early June — claiming that Adams and his team were unprepared and failed to effectively communicate the risks to New Yorkers in a timely way.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and several City Council members made their displeasure with the administration clear at a hearing of the Council’s Oversight and Investigations Committee, where they grilled Adam’s Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol and other top administration officials about when they first started communicating with the public, how they conveyed those messages and what specifically was said.

The hearing comes weeks after the wildfire smoked descended onto the city, at one point turning the skies an orange hue.

Williams, who offered up some of the harshest criticisms, attacked the administration’s argument that it began sending messages out to New Yorkers about the potential for poor air quality days before the smoke arrived through the city’s Notify NYC service — a method Williams described as lacking.

“Notify NYC is not the most effective way to put information out there,” he said. “There should have been a more urgent and effective way to let people know how bad the air quality was.”

The administration has claimed the Notify NYC service reaches 1 million city residents, but before Wednesday, many critics have questioned its effectiveness. That didn’t stop Iscol from attempting to go on the offensive during the hearing, saying at one point that portions of a report Williams put out on the smoke were “factually incorrect” and suggesting the report ignored some of the city’s response to the smoke.

“Dr. Vasan and I did a lot of press,” Iscol noted, referring to the head of the city’s Health Department.

When Williams asked Iscol to specify which days he and Vasan did press events, Iscol responded: “I can get you the list.”

“I hate that these conversations have to get tense because we should be looking forward,” Williams said. “But this is important because we’ve been pushing a better way to communicate to the public since COVID — and we don’t have it. And we’re saying that we communicated to the public the best way we could have from [June] 2nd to the 7th, and the public would disagree with you because they had no idea there was a problem till the sky turned orange.”

Adams and his team first came under fire for their response in early June just as the smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted into the city, with Council members claiming the administration had been caught flatfooted and was slow in alerting the public of the risks.

Since then, Adams and officials in his administration have pushed back and their rebuttals resumed even before Wednesday, with Iscol defending the administration in a Daily News op-ed and Adams himself taking to the airwaves Wednesday morning to preempt the Council hearing scheduled for later that day.

“What should we have done? Put out the fires?” Adams said on Fox 5, claiming that the criticism he’s getting is coming from the “same usual suspects.” He then pointed to Williams in particular.

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“Whenever we do anything, watch the same usual suspects who are doing nothing start talking about what we ought to do,” the mayor continued. “Look at what this administration has done, navigated us through COVID. Remember the same Jumaane Williams that stated, ‘We should shut down the city,’ and I said, ‘No, our schools are going to open, our city is going to move forward.’

“They criticized us for going after illegal scooters on our streets, they criticize us for removing guns off our streets, they criticize us to criticize us. They need sound bites, so let them do the sound bites, I’m going to create a sound city,” Adams said.

Williams responded during the hearing, saying that his criticism is not “for criticism’s sake, as he said — this is literally my job.”

Data compiled in a Council briefing memo obtained Wednesday by The News recommended that Adams’ team consider coordinating with the state to notify the public through announcements on subways and issue a “Code Red” in an effort to move homeless people indoors during future and similar events.

Councilman Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn) said the city “failed” New Yorkers in general and the city’s homeless in particular when the smoke descended on the city. He called Iscol’s op-ed in The News “revisionist history” and described the city’s response as “totally unacceptable.”

“These folks were ignored,” Restler said, referring to the city’s homeless population. “At the June 7 press conference that you held with the mayor after this onset of the emergency occurred, the issue of homelessness and homeless New Yorkers was not mentioned once.”

Iscol maintained that city workers performed “additional outreach” among the city’s homeless and distributed masks.