BUFFALO, N.Y. — A report from the United States Postal Service inspector general was released to the public Thursday and found that post office management in the Buffalo area neglected the safety of its carriers during the Christmas blizzard of 2022.
The 24-page document outlines the missteps of management on Dec. 23, 2022, including that it waited more than three hours after Erie County enacted a travel ban to send its workers home on paid administrative leave.
David J. Grosskopf Jr., president of the local branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, was interviewed by the inspector general and said he tried to reason with managers that day.
“I was pleading with the manager of customer service, ‘Shut this thing down, Get these people out of here,’ ” he said.
He said the workers’ collective bargaining agreement makes it so if they leave without approval, they have to take paid time off for the remainder of the day. He said managers tend to wait as long as possible to call off the operation because if they do, they’ll have to pay for administrative leave.
Grosskopf believes that happened that day.
By the time that the operation was called off, many workers chose to drive home, and at that time it was too late. A pregnant carrier from the Williamsville office got stranded and needed to be rescued by the fire department and taken to a shelter.
“To me, that's just a complete leadership failure,” Grosskopf said.
The report also released a list of four recommendations going forward. They included updating management instructions to establish appropriate timelines for communicating preparedness information in advance, reiterating responsibilities of management to close facilities when situations become life-threatening, updating policies to include who is responsible for conducting an after-action report, and developing a process to verify after-action reports include lessons learned to incorporate in the following year’s toolkit.
However, the managers only accepted the third recommendation, and the inspector general said they’ll have further conversations about the others.
“Why would you say you're not going to listen to the recommendations of an agency who's tasked with investigating and recommending corrective action?” Grosskopf said.
Grosskopf and other postal service employees are left hoping this once-in-a-generational storm truly strikes just once in a generation.
“You want to leave that blueprint in case this stuff happens for the people that come after you, so they know what to do, so there is no loss of life,” he said.
He does feel that some progress has been made, as the postmaster shut down operations ahead of expected blizzard conditions for the first time in history before this January’s blizzard.