ORCHARD PARK, NY — Cleveland and Buffalo share parts of the Lake Erie coast and receive their fair share of snow each year from it, but how they get hit by Lake Effect squalls is different. When Cleveland gets snow, the cold winds tend to travel out of the northwest across the width of the lake, having 57 miles of open water between our coast and Canada to pick up the warm lake water, which creates the lake-effect snow clouds. But when Buffalo gets hit, the winds tend to be out of the southwest, meaning they travel the length of the lake, 241 miles in all, to gather that moisture with Buffalo in its bullseye on the northeastern end and these bands of snow tend to consolidate into around a 15 mile firehose of snow. That’s how they end up with snowfalls measured in feet not inches.
This week in November is always a prime time for big snows, with the lake still warm but the first blasts of arctic air coming down. In fact, two of Western New York’s biggest snow events ever also occurred during this week. The most recent coming in 2014, a snow that also started on November 18 and lasted for five days dumped 7 feet of snow in spots over the course of five days. The Buffalo Bills were scheduled to host a game that Sunday against the New York Jets. It was close to 48 hours after the snow had stopped, but still, the decision was made to move the game to Monday and move it to Detroit. A move that set the precedent for Thursday's decision to do the same thing this weekend.
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The other storm blew up on November 20, 2000. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, the city had just received about a foot of snow over the weekend, and only a little additional snow was projected. So when it started snowing around 11 a.m., it didn’t spark too much alarm, but soon it was coming down at the rate of about 3 inches or more an hour. The city ended up with 25 inches in about seven hours. Schools and businesses, all realizing this wasn’t stopping, let out around the same time, and soon there was gridlock on the streets. Cars weren’t moving, so the plows couldn’t either, and the snow just mounted.
The end result was where your car was stopped at 4 p.m. that day was where it still was at 4 the next morning, stranding not only thousands of motorists, but thousands of school kids who had to spend the night wherever they could find shelter. I was working in Buffalo at the time, and the hospital at the end of my street ended up taking in seven busloads of Buffalo school children stranded within walking distance.
For this storm, the region is prepared, with the governor declaring a state of emergency in advance of the first flakes, and the New York State Thruway putting in place a driving ban for commercial vehicles from essentially the Pennsylvania border north through Buffalo and east towards Rochester, a roughly 120-mile stretch of highway that was eventually closed to all traffic for several days in 2014.
Stay with News 5 for continuing weather updates.
