Buffalo, Used to Winter’s Worst, Shut Down by Snow

A dynamo of a storm dumped more than 2 feet of snow on Buffalo on Sunday, shutting down a city that prides itself on waking up each winter morning prepared for the worst.

That’s just what people got with the snow that began falling Saturday evening and kept on going. While not nearly as big as the blizzard of 1977, which lasted for days, the storm laid down 34 inches of snow in less than 24 hours to break the record set in 1982 by 9 inches. And more was in the forecast.

A state of emergency was in effect, with all non-urgent travel barred from the streets of this city of 328,000 in western New York.

Even Sunday’s Buffalo Sabres hockey game against the Tampa Bay Lightning was postponed.

The snow along the eastern tip of Lake Erie was spawned by a so-called lake-effect storm, in which cold wind picks up moisture from the as-yet-unfrozen lake.

“It just dumps a lot of snow in a narrow band,” National Weather Service meteorologist Ed Mahoney said. “This is a little tiny band about 5 miles wide, and, if it doesn’t move, it keeps on dumping and dumping and dumping.”

Elsewhere around the Great Lakes, fresh snow was welcome but the subzero cold was not.

Some Wisconsin ski areas have their earliest usable snow in years, but wind chills down to 40 below weren’t such good news.

The Arctic cold wave extended to the East Coast and south to the Gulf of Mexico, where temperatures fell to record lows.

At Jimmy Hale Downtown Mission in Birmingham, Ala., where Sunday’s low was 13, all 81 beds were filled Saturday night and the overflow of homeless men piled onto pallets on the floor and slept in pews in the chapel, supervisor Johnny Cook said.

South of Buffalo, a 46-mile stretch of the New York State Thruway was closed by up to a foot of snow and abandoned vehicles. Interstate 190 from Buffalo to Niagara Falls was closed as well.

Walden Galleria Mall, the largest shopping center in the area, had to shut down on what would have been one of its busiest Christmas shopping days.

“It is quiet,” a mall security supervisor said. “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”