A man used a long fishing net to scrape snow off his roof just south of Buffalo, New York.
BUFFALO — Brian Burke hasn’t left his small house on the shore of Lake Erie since Tuesday morning. Surrounded by snow, he was able to open the door a crack, just enough to get out, and then over the next 20 minutes, burrow a tunnel to the far side of his house to reach a furnace vent. To avoid carbon monoxide poisoning, he wiped away drifts of snow that had reached four feet high, and came back inside.
Then the snow kept piling up, and now he can’t even open the door.
“You can’t escape,” he said by telephone. “I feel like I’m in solitary.”
More than 5 feet of snow have fallen on the Buffalo area since Tuesday. Ten people have died, mostly because of heart attacks suffered while cleaning off the snow or from exposure to the cold. Some areas have seen significant property damage that will only worsen as roofs cave in under the weight of wet, heavy snow. And though there was a respite Thursday, and the sun broke through in some areas, several more inches of snow are in the forecast.
Through it all, however, the people in Buffalo as a whole have not been downcast. Some expressed hope that the world will see the resilience that has lent the city one of its nicknames, The City of Good Neighbors, and that in the face of the wintry onslaught, Erie County has not descended into chaos.
“ ‘The City of Good Neighbors’ thing is really still prevalent,” said Elizabeth Callahan, a 28-year-old worker at the regional Chamber of Commerce. “We’re learning to deal with it better. It could be worse. It’s not a hurricane. It’s not a tornado. The snow will melt, and things will get back to normal.”
Even with the ferocity of the snowfall, the biggest power outage associated with the storm affected only 3,500 homes along the Lake Erie shoreline Thursday, and the lights came back on after two hours.
But officials are far from declaring victory. Governor Andrew Cuomo on Thursday warned residents to stay indoors, and said that major thoroughfares, including the New York State Thruway, will remain closed. Plows have to clear the roads of the snow that has already piled up, he said, and drivers risk getting stuck.
“There is a driving ban,” he said. “Stay in your homes, pretty, pretty please.”
In the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga, a nursing home with approximately 180 residents had to be evacuated because operators feared the roof would collapse. In Cheektowaga and West Seneca, about 50 people were reportedly evacuated from mobile home parks because of potential roof collapses. Interstate 90 remained closed from Rochester through Buffalo, and south to the Pennsylvania line, and driving bans strictly enforced by police were in place Thursday evening in many towns.
People might be stranded in the snow, but they aren’t completely cut off. The 33-year-old Burke, who works for the Buffalo housing authority, can’t watch the TV news, because his satellite dish isn’t working. But he can use his phone to check for storm updates, and pass the time watching movies while wondering whether his roof will hold up under the four feet of wet snow piled atop it.
The loss of power of was limited partly because wind gusts were not as bad as in other storms, and most of the leaves are off the trees, so branches didn’t blow around as much. In New England -- where storms that deliver only a fraction of the snowfall can knock out the power for tens of thousands of residents for days on end -- high winds, shore flooding, and softer ground can lead to more outages, said National Grid spokesman Stephen Brady.
And despite the dire warnings to stay home, parts of the city and the northern suburbs were bustling with traffic Thursday. Roads had been plowed down to the pavement, and people went to restaurants and stores that withstood the storm.
Buffalo has worked mightily to dig out from under its reputation as a barren outpost notable for chicken wings, Super Bowl losses, and ferocious blizzards that blow in from Lake Erie. The city has worked to capitalize on its rich history as the terminus of the Erie Canal, its cheap real estate, and a growing downtown scene that offers cuisine far more diverse than spicy, mild, and BBQ.
When Cuomo, who has committed to spending $1 billion in Western New York on economic development, visits Buffalo, he typically talks about how the city’s mood has brightened and people are more optimistic.
He frequently mentions his administration’s efforts to land a California solar-panel manufacturer, billionaire Elon Musk’s SolarCity, to a new $750 million facility on the city’s south side, creating 2,900 jobs. (But that site was all under snow this week, unreachable because of a driving ban.)
Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula is spending $172 million on a hockey and hotel complex on the waterfront that will draw major National Hockey League events, including the 2016 draft. But the team was not immune from the storm; it postponed its home game Friday. And the beloved, if star-crossed, Buffalo Bills have to leave town to face the New York Jets in a matchup that had been scheduled as a home game this Sunday.
Casey Smigelski, a 30-year-old IT worker, hopes that people don’t get the wrong impression of the city, though he knows that after all the news coverage, it will be tough to convince people otherwise.
“It’s not like this all the time,” said Smigelski, who has been able to tunnel through the five feet of snow in his driveway, but hasn’t been able to leave his South Buffalo neighborhood since Tuesday. “This is unbelievable, even for us.”
Jill Terreri Ramos can be reached at Jillterreri@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @jillterreri.
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