Remembering Buffalo's Blizzard of '77.........

[poltr1]

This past weekend, folks were stranded at Arisia in Boston due to the snow. Several years ago, people were stranded at Musicon 5 in Nashville for the same reason. So, what is there to do? There's no programming planned beyond Sunday's closing ceremonies, so people probably just got together and hung out, stayed in their hotel rooms, or sat at the hotel bar downing drinks. At Musicon, there was the "sled dog" filk which lasted well into Monday morning.

28 years ago today -- has it really been 28 years since then? -- a lake-effect blizzard hit Western New York. I was living there in Tonawanda, NY at the time, and in junior high. Our school district was closed that day (Friday, January 28), presumably because there was enough weather information to predict the arrival of this storm. The storm hit in the later morning, at around 11 AM. While we lived north of Buffalo, and therefore away from the traditional "snow belt" areas of Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties, we still got a lot of snow. The blowing snow left a drift that covered the picture window of my parents' house.

(How lake-effect snow happens: Warm air passes over unfrozen lake and picks up water vapor. Warm air passes over cold land and cools off quickly. Cold air can't hold water as well as warm air, so it has to dump the water somehow, and quickly. Usually it does so as snow.)


Since school was already closed, my sister and I were home. I don't remember if my father was at work that day, but I think he came home later in the afternoon after his workplace dismissed everyone. And so I went out with the shovel, and my dad brought out the snowblower. A few of our neighbors were also out shoveling, and like a true community of neighbors, we helped dig each other out. Since our street was a minor thoroughfare, the plows also came by to clear our street.....and dump more snow in our driveway.

A house down the street from us made the front page of the local news, as they had dug a tunnel from the garage to the front yard, through a high snow drift in their driveway.

Some people were stranded downtown at work, and since this was the week Roots was on, many were watching episode 6 in the basements or work areas that had TV sets.

They soon announced that schools would be closed for an entire week, and the mayor of Buffalo declared a driving ban to all but non-emergency traffic within the city limits.

We still had our electricity, our gas, our telephone, our water, and our sewage services. And most important, we had plenty of food stored away, so we were set for the duration.

So, what's a 12-year-old to do after a snowstorm? Besides shoveling, of course. Go outside and have fun in the snow. One of my neighbors had a 5' snowdrift in their backyard, so we brought our sleds and saucers, and sledded down the snowdrift.

In the meantime, the parents of the kids in the neighborhood got together and had the idea of hosting the kids one day during the next week, rotating houses, and giving us crafts and things to do in the daytime. For some reason, my parents didn't host the neighborhood kids that week; the slack was picked up by another neighbor.

My dad went out with his 8mm movie camera, making home movies of the neighborhood during the storm. He went to the local golf course, where a lot of the snow was piled after it was cleared by the plows. One of the scenes he filmed was that of a car going by, about 15-20 feet below him. (If I had a copy of the film or video, and a way to feed it into the computer, I'd have digital still images to share.)

Some Metromelt machines were brought in from Toronto to melt the piles of snow that had accumulated in the city.

Eventually, the roads were cleared, the driving ban was lifted, and we went back to school. In order to make up for the lost time, we had an extra week of school at the end of June. I think the State had to create special Regents exams for us. (These are state-wide exams, given to all the schools at the same time to ensure that the tests aren't leaked.) The golf course was quite soggy that year. And one enterprising person created a "Blizzard of '77" board game.

All told, we had nearly 200 inches of snow that year. As far as I know, that record still stands.

The following year, a blizzard hit most of the state of Ohio, so the locals here remember the blizzard of '78. But I don't remember it, other than the news reports, because I wasn't here at the time. And there was another blizzard in '85, but that's for another time.

Despite the event, I still like snow, as long as I don't have to shovel or drive in the stuff. And maybe that's why I've become such a packrat -- to give myself something to do when the next blizzard hits, and thus not get cabin fever.

And I'm sure dagonell and gleepy have their own stories to tell.

Comments

[persis.livejournal.com]

Actually, we had Arisia 05.1, with programming until about 8 pm. I kept Fast Track (aka Kid's Programming) open formally until 5, with the promise that if parents wanted to help me clean up, their kids could keep playing... I ended up letting about 6 little girls make some more costumes with the gazillion boxes of fabric I had collected. :-) And the dealer's up on the 7th floor Dealer's Row stayed open, as they couldn't go anywhere, had to pay for an additional night at the hotel, and figured that they should try to make some money. It was the first *I'd* seen of that part of the con, so I was glad they stayed open. And there were lots of people around, and parties going on; I was up until 2ish.

[jslove.livejournal.com]

I remember the Blizzards of '78 and '79, in Boston. In '78, Massachusetts was closed for three days; a declared state of emergency.

The '78 blizzard is especially memorable for me because I was at work, in Cambridge, writing software I think, at ECD, a small company with big plans. Then I noticed smoke coming up the freight elevator shaft. I went to investigate and found smoke coming up the stairwells, as well. This was not good. I had visions of all the work I had done for a year and a half on the MicroMind going up in flames.

I think I yelled, but I did not go and check our floor for other people. There was someone asleep in our bunk-room although I wasn't aware of it at the time. Fortunately, one of the other people in the building, either Dick Eckhardt or Ron Todd, had the presence of mind to do this.

What I did was to leave the building immediately, running through snow drifts around the corner from 196 Broadway to 125 Portland street, where I had an apartment, and from there I called 911. This wasted about a minute, i think.

The person who answered at 911 drawled, in the most laconic voice imaginable, "Emergency."

"I want to report a fire."

"Where?" I had his full attention; it sounded like a completely different person.

Broadway was a snow emergency route, so it was kept clear, and the fire engines arrived with commendable quickness. However, the fire appeared to be at the loading dock, which was on Portland street, and that was blocked with between 18 and 23 inches of snow, not counting drifts. It took a while for the firemen to clear a path to the fire.

I think there had been a garbage strike before the blizzard. In any case, the loading dock was piled high with garbage. Some of it was really food garbage since ECD kept food on hand as an inducement for its workers. More on that later.

The firemen opined that perhaps someone had been playing with matches and set fire to the garbage. I don't think it was ever known for sure how the fire started. The loading dock, for some reason, was the only part of the building that didn't have a sprinkler system to put out the fire.

Anyway, the fire was put out; the damage wasn't too bad, and everything returned to normal. Except for the smell; that took several days to dissipate.

Just down Portland Street was the Washington Elms housing project. Low-income housing provided by the state, I think. It was a series of low, brick buildings. Each building had an incinerator for its garbage. Every morning before 7AM, they ran the incinerators.

For the next half year, until my lease ran out September 1, I would wake bolt upright in bed as the smell of burning garbage infiltrated my apartment, flashing back to seeing all my work going up in flames. Although it hadn't actually gone up in flames, business reversals killed ECD a couple of months later, so it might as well have.

When my lease ran out, I moved to where the air was cleaner, or at least different.

There was also a later blizzard. I forget the year, but I remember a valiant attempt to bury Transparent Horizons (a huge "sculpture", that is, art) under an enormous mound of snow by many of the residents of the adjacent MIT dowm; I helped.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Hey, wait, you're from Tonawanda?

How many people did you know who graduated in 1980?

[poltr1]

Yep. If they went to Kenmore East or Kenmore West high schools, I probably didn't know them. But if they went to Sweet Home high school, I might know them since that's where I went. (The district boundary line is right behind my parents' house.) One of the friends from my Boy Scout troop moved to Grand Island in the late 70s.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I remember the blizzard of '78, because the snow drifts were considerably higher than I was, and yet i still made it in to preschool every single day. :-> Our house was only accessible through the second-floor stairwell window (set of apartments, really, not a house), as the front door was completely buried.