Shoveling, clearing, clearing, finding an open store. Residents of western New York state in the United States continued all day Tuesday to grapple with the aftermath of the “storm of the century”. The Buffalo region, downwind of the Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, became the starting point for an arctic freeze and a huge winter storm that spread across most of the United States on Friday and during the Christmas weekend, to the Mexican border.
Nationally, the death toll has risen further: at least 65 people have died in weather-related incidents in recent days, according to NBC News. New York State accounts for more than half, and the city of Buffalo has been particularly hard hit. “We are recovering from the worst storm I have ever seen, certainly in terms of deaths from mother nature’s wrath,” Mark Poloncarz, chief executive of Erie County, where Buffalo is located, told reporters.
In and around Buffalo, up to 132 cm of snow fell in four days, and it snowed again on Tuesday, but without the killer blizzard. At around 9 p.m. Tuesday evening (3 a.m. Wednesday local time), the National Weather Service (NWS) of Buffalo tweeted, “This is the first time since 2:22 p.m. Dec. 20 that we have NO warning of winter weather in effect for our region. That is one week, 6 hours, 38 minutes”.
Confirming seven more deaths in Buffalo, Mayor Byron Brown said on television that the storm was “probably worse than anything this city has seen in over 50 years.” At a Zoom press conference later, Brown said another body had been found.
Driving ban extended
Throughout Tuesday, rescue teams continued to locate and remove vehicles buried under mounds of snow and snowdrifts several meters high. Many residents, who until recently couldn’t see anything from their windows because of the blizzard, come out to see the spectacle of such amounts of snow.
Buffalo’s driving ban has been extended, yet “we are still finding a lot of people who are impeding our efforts as first responders,” said city public works commissioner Nathan Marton. His department is trying to clear at least one lane for emergency vehicles. “Some streets are being targeted for additional clearance to allow for proper drainage of meltwater,” Poloncarz added on Twitter.
Because the weather changes are fearing floods. The NWS predicts a rapid thaw later in the week, with spring temperatures well above freezing and well above normal, accompanied by rains that could trigger flooding. While it was still between -2 and -6°C on Tuesday, it should be 8°C on Thursday, and 12°C on Saturday.
VIDEO. Storm in the United States: this restaurant caught in the ice by the “blizzard of the century”
Front-loading tractors were therefore brought in to shovel the snow into dump trucks to be taken away and dumped elsewhere. According to Mark Poloncarz, it will take two days to open a lane on every street in the city. Giant snowblowers have been deployed to help clear several major roads congested with huge snowdrifts. The county called in 100 military police from the state National Guard as well as New York City officers to help manage traffic and enforce traffic restrictions.
On the heating side, hundreds of employees of the electric company are hard at work restoring power. If this Wednesday morning, according to Power Outage, there are only 2,000 homes without power in New York State, and as many in Maine, there are still more than 93,500 in Oregon, 34,500 in Washington State and more than 17,700 in California.