Road and utility crews faced the task on Monday of digging out and restoring some normalcy around Buffalo, New York, where a blizzard considered the area’s worst in 45 years buried snow plows, stranded motorists in cars and killed at least 13 people.
The lethal blizzard took form late on Friday and pummeled western New York through the Christmas holiday weekend, capping an Arctic freeze and winter storm front that had extended over most of the United States for days, as far south as the Mexican border.
At least 30 people have died in U.S. weather-related incidents since late last week, according to an NBC News tally, while CNN put the total number of fatalities at 26.
The greater Buffalo region, lying at the edge of Lake Erie near the Canadian border was one of the hardest-hit places.
Numbing cold combined with howling winds and heavy “lake-effect” snow – the result of moisture picked up by frigid air moving over warmer lake waters – produced a storm that Governor Kathy Hochul said would go down in history as “the Blizzard of ’22.”
The storm’s official death toll in Buffalo and elsewhere in Erie County climbed to 13 on Sunday, and was expected to rise as more bodies found in snow drifts or buried vehicles were examined and confirmed as weather-related fatalities, authorities said.
The governor called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster that ranked as the fiercest winter storm to hit Buffalo, New York state’s second-largest city, since a crippling 1977 blizzard that killed nearly 30 people.
The latest blizzard, which initially overwhelmed emergency crews, came nearly six weeks after a record-setting but shorter-lived lake-effect storm struck western New York.
RESCUING THE RESCUERS
Despite a ban on road travel imposed since Friday, hundreds of Erie County motorists were stranded in their vehicles over the weekend, with National Guard troops mobilized to help with rescues hindered by blinding white-out conditions.
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