Moving the Bills game seems to have been the right move. Get this: ” Orchard Park, where the NFL’s Buffalo Bills play, has picked up 77.0 inches in the last 48 hours”
Sports Update: the Bills will play Sunday – in Detroit!
Weird stuff: Buffalo Channel 4 Weather has confirmed 77 inches in Orchard Park, a southern suburb, but Tonawanda, a northern suburb, has received only three inches! Orchard Park is directly in line with the eastern shore of Lake Erie, while Tonawanda is just far enough north on the Niagara River that it is out of the direct path of the lake effect snow.
Don’t know where you’re from but a “lake effect” storm can pretty much put the kibosh on any place from Cleveland on northeast and pretty much all the way through north central New York. That’s as in fuck things up for up to a week and we’re talking people who know how to deal with the stuff. And they can blow up pretty late in the year to boot. One in early April delayed the former Tribe’s home opener for a week in 2007; the Indians actually played their first “home” series in Milwaukee.
It’s that light, fluffy stuff. You can blow that stuff off your car. Not like a real storm.
That’s true – in some ways, it’s not a “real” storm.
For example, we never lost power in the infamous Blizzard of ’66, so it’s not like a hurricane. There is always danger to households without an able-bodied member, however, since they can get sealed into their homes by the snow piles. My dad and I had to climb out of a second-story window onto the flat roof of the attached garage. That left us only an easy 8 or 9 foot drop from the edge, which is no drop at all to a six-foot man hanging by his hands, so we picked whichever side of the garage had the least snow, dropped, and started to make our way to the garage door. We had to clear the garage door with our bare hands in order to get to the shovels. Our garage was attached to the house, but had no door directly from the house to the garage, for reasons still incomprehensible to me. (The house was built in 1927. I suppose they had not yet seen a need for that.)
Anyway, the point of the anecdote is that we were able to get out of the house only because two big, healthy guys lived there. Many of our neighbors were not so lucky and had to rely on the kindness of good Samaritans in the neighborhood, first to dig them out, then to get them things they needed like food and medicine. It was a time remembered for people helping people, with liberals and conservatives on the same page for once. For the first few days after the blizzard, no vehicular traffic was possible. Some people had oil heat and ran out of oil, with the trucks unable to reach them. There were no newspaper deliveries in many neighborhoods. (But bless the post office – they almost maintained normal service.) Most supermarkets remained closed for several days, but all the mom ‘n pops saw that as an opportunity, trudged to their shops on foot, and made a windfall profit from emptying the shelves.
And schools were closed for one full week!
I look back on it with fond memories of a unique experience, not like the kind of memories generated by a hurricane or tornado.
The magic of living in a heavy snow area is that you get to make awesome snow forts. My brother made a two story snow fort when I was a kid. We kept a ladder in the fort so that you could climb up through a hole in the roof and then throw snowballs at the poor saps down below.