Snow--4 to 6 Feet: Western New Yorkers: How Do You Deal with It?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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We had a couple of instances of 3-5’ of snow falling overnight during the decade I lived in Flagstaff. We dealt with it by staying inside and playing video games. You couldn’t go anywhere, so you didn’t.

We were also all young, healthy, and able to survive on nothing but ramen and coffee for a couple of days at a time. Our main problems were appropriate distribution of all of the bedding we’d dragged out of the back to make our nest on the living room floor, and where to plug in all the laptops so we didn’t trip over any adapters. They dug us out pretty quickly; we were near the university, which was on the only highway into town, and the snow never kept falling like that – it was a whiteout blitz, then it calmed down.

I can’t fathom the absolute standstill that western NY must have ground to. And now that I’m older, I have a harder time feeling sanguine about not being able to get to work.

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The big problem during the storm is people getting stuck on roads. That’s why they always try to stop all traffic before the snow begins to fall. Unfortunately, an impending snow fall sends a lot of people out on trips to the store or to check relatives and some of them get caught out on the roads.

After that, you have the people going out to shovel snow. This is when people have heart attacks from the unusual physical exertion. And these people can get caught up in another problem - people die because ambulances and other emergency vehicles have a hard time responding through the snow.

Another problem is the weight of the snow. This is heavy wet snow. When it piles up on roofs, some buildings collapse.

And finally, there’s the problem of when the temperature starts to go back up - and western NY is now back in the fifties. All that snow is now melting and causing flooding.