snow – Bill Burk’s collective writing…and some other stuff.

Blizzard of 1977: The White Wall

PART II

“What the…what are you doing?”

Me and my friends track snow through the front door, up the stairs to the second floor. “We’re playing.”

“Why are you in the house? You’re making a mess!” My mother closes the door against the snow that drifts into the living room, knuckles on hips, lip pursed. “And you’re letting the heat out!”

I stop in my tracks. I know that tone. It’s the “Turn off the lights, do you work for the electric company?” “Eat your dinner, kids somewhere are starving.” “If you’re friends jumped off a roof, would you?” voice.

Those friends (who I’d naturally follow off a bridge) run into my bedroom on the second floor, throw open the window that overlooks the porch roof, and climb out.

“Mo-om… we have to jump from up here. The snow’s too high.”

“You’re jumping from…upstairs!?”

“The roof.”

“The roof?”

You’re a kid and you don’t have to go anywhere or work a shovel -except to build snow forts and uncover your sled. So, you wrap up in as many layers as your mother can load on you, and you go outside and play, comfortable in the fact that you’re allowed to come right back inside when your fingers and toes turn blue and your runny nose freezes in your scarf. When you’re a kid, a blizzard is a trip through a Narnian wardrobe. It’s not a lethal weather distaster.

The blizzard of 1977 was a catastrophic weather event for western, New York. Twenty-eight people died from exposure, entrapment and vehicle incidents. Highways and airports shut down, stranding thousands, keeping commerce and emergency aid from moving anywhere. Homes were buried in forty-foot drifts, outages and blocked roads created shortages. There were significant livestock deaths and agricultural losses. Anything that needed to be delivered (especially milk from local dairy farmers) wasn’t. Power failed. Remote areas were cut off for days.

Buffalo took the brunt of the storm, but the entire southern tier was burdened by the wall of white that spent three days dumping snow. The snowfall amounts had been (and has been) matched, but the combination of freezing temperatures and unpredictable winds were incomparable.

Some thirteen-thousand people were stranded in Buffalo, ten-thousand cars abandoned. Snow mobiles became the only viable, reliable mode of transportation, but even these had to be limited when they ran into covered vehicles, then building tops, then power lines.

Staying inside and riding the storm out, without a plan, was dangerous as well. Houses were covered, with no way to vent noxious fumes that built up from heating systems, strangling utilities.

The city of Buffalo dominated the national narrative of the blizzard. Chautauqua and Cattaraugus Counties experienced the storm the same, on a miniature scale, smaller populations, with corresponding resources. Both counties rely heavily on a network of rural roads and state highways, most notably Route 60 and the New York State Thruway (I-90). Within hours of the storm’s onset, these arteries were clogged with abandoned vehicles. The storm warranted a complete ban on driving, but the independent and rural character of the population made many people try to commute. It quickly became impossible. Motorists, blinded by whiteout conditions, drove into ditches or simply stopped in the middle of a road, buried in drifts. Sheriff departments and local police had to recue people in vehicles that weren’t much more mobile than the stranded cars. They were overwhelmed. For days, the only functional vehicles were heavy military equipment and private snowmobiles, delivering medicine and food.

A federal state of emergency was declared -the first time ever for a snowstorm, and over five-hundred national guardsmen were deployed to Buffalo and surrounding towns. The Blizzard of 1977 set the standard for snow-related catastrophic emergency response protocol throughout the United States, specifically the severity and seriousness of bans on driving in affected areas.

My dad eventually brought a ladder to the yard, and we climbed to the porch roof from outside. We were kids with a week off school, jumping in piles of snow. We didn’t know we were in the middle of the Blizzard of 1977.

The BLIZZARD Of 1977

A winter like the old days.

Lake Erie froze solid December 16^th, 1976. That’s early. It happens, earlier some years, but the lake almost always thaws after that at some point. We use Lake Erie’s surface status as a snowfall predictor. A solid Lake Erie usually means a milder winter; annual nor-eastern winds skim over the ice instead of pulling moisture and turning it into pregnant snow bands. A liquid Erie generates familiar snow bands and squalls, winters that turn a hundred inches of snow into two hundred.

In 1976 the lake froze and stayed that way, the traditional harbinger of relatively mild snowfall for counties bordering the great lake. The difference in ‘76 was an unusually heavy snowfall over the lake. Precipitation that would normally melt, accumulated on the lake’s surface, deep, wispy, light snow.

January of 1977 was the coldest month on record in Western New York to that date, averaging 13.8 °F. There was no melt, anywhere, and snowfall throughout the month, though not overwhelming, was steady. Bufalo had fifty-nine inches by the middle of January. There is no reported total snowfall for Jamestown, Dunkirk or Olean prior to the storm, but all three cities had over a hundred forty inches after the blizzard hit.

And the snow on Lake Erie was piled high…too high.

Thursday, January 27^th. An arctic front builds a wall of snow that passes through Indianapolis, then Columbus, Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio. By evening the wall arrives in Erie, Pennsylvania (Erie will report more than five hundred vehicles accidents that morning). Winds scoop up all that snow off Lake Erie and carry it east with the already-packed clouds. Thursday night winds hit forty-nine miles per hour, driving a once in a century blizzard toward Western, New York.

Friday, January 28^th. Witnesses describe what looks like a grey mist moving toward the southeastern cities bordering Lake Erie. Lightning flashes inside the maelstrom.

The mist turns into a menacing wall of white as it closes on the southern tier of New York, a blanket is thrown over the world. Visibility is nonexistent inside the white hurricane. The mass of snow from Lake Erie is dropped randomly all over Chautauqua, Cattaraugus, Erie, and Wyoming counties. By 1:00 pm snow begins to cover cars, first bumper high, then up to the windows. By evening drifts fifteen feet high are scattered throughout the region. The wind whips and shapes the snow without discrimination. Mounds of snow are picked up and randomly dropped, then moved again. A road that is bare one minute is impassable the next, shocking travelers with the arbitrary intensity.

Friday evening, winds gust to almost seventy miles per hour. Wind chills drop to sixty degrees below zero.By midnight, Buffalo, New York is crippled, an estimated two thousand cars are stranded on Main Street and about eight thousand on streets throughout the city. The south towns are frozen solid, covered in drifts.

Saturday, January 29^th. Visibility improves in the morning, and municipalities send their plows and emergency crews out to clean up and assess damage. Abandoned cars are a major impediment to the effort. In Buffalo, trucks and payloaders dump snow into the Niagara River. In the south towns of Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties area roads have become wintry tunnels, and parking lots are filled with banks of snow removed from roads.

Sunday, January 30^th. The wind and snow subside, and the sun comes out briefly. Towns come alive. Major roads are cleared.

With the weather softening and single lanes on major roads clearing, people head out into the world, to run errands, to witness the marvels of the blizzard.

But the wind isn’t done with New York. At 3:00 pm, the wind increases and blowing snow once again turns visibility to nil. Driving becomes treacherous. Vehicles are stranded anew and abandoned cars block roads that had just been freed. A peak gust of 58 mph is recorded at the Buffalo airport. That night the wind chill falls to minus forty degrees.

Monday, January 31st. Most roads are closed by overnight snow. Fire departments spend time checking houses snow-covered to their roofs to make sure nobody is freezing or suffocating.

The blizzard has blown itself out. The effects of its carnage are just being realized.