Report: NYC Sanitation Workers Drank Beer, Sat in Car During Blizzard, Say Witnesses

NEW YORK (CBS/AP) The head of New York City's Sanitation Department said Monday that workers did everything they should have done in order to clean-up the city's streets after a blizzard practically put the "City that Never Sleeps" to bed during the Christmas weekend.

So, does that include drinking on the job?

According to the New York Post, four sanitation supervisors are under investigation after witnesses accused them of neglecting their duties to plow the city's streets last Monday night, and instead bought a couple six-packs of beer and sat in their warm car for hours while six people were stranded on a bus just blocks away.

"We're looking into what happened," Department of Investigation Assistant Commissioner Keith Schwam told the newspaper.

Witnesses claim the four city employees purchased the alcohol at a Brooklyn deli then trudged through the 20 inches of snow to their sedan where they allegedly stayed all night with the car running, reports The Post.

In the morning, they returned to the store where they supposedly told their bosses over the phone that their vehicle had run out of gas, states the paper.

"This guy was on his cell and said, 'We're out of fuel,' " a witness told The Post.

The public's disapproval with clean-up efforts has been piling higher than the slush and garbage left on streets since the snowstorm. Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed the city used the same number of workers as in previous storms and said the next step is determining what went wrong.

According to The Post, the DOI is also looking into whether sanitation workers contributed to the winter madness with an organized slowdown.