"Slushy rain," said the forecast.
Technically, the weatherman wasn't wrong. There was plenty of slush in Buffalo and much of Western New York late last week, and it did rain quite a bit in the same areas on Saturday.
The prediction was missing something, though. Like the two feet of snow that fell in less than 24 hours, from Thursday afternoon through Friday morning.
If you didn't leave Niagara Falls, though, and didn't turn on the television or radio or pick up a newspaper, you'd have thought it was just another fall weekend. More like November than October, maybe. But nothing terribly remarkable, much less historic.
For those who treat living in Niagara Falls like a prison sentence, there's a definite meteorological upside. Nearly every truly brutal storm, the ones that send camera crews from The Weather Channel scurrying to Buffalo, gives this city a miss.
Residents of the Falls watched the Thanksgiving Monday storm of 2000, when lightning flashed over downtown Buffalo as more than two feet of snow poured down, most of it during a few afternoon hours, on television with the rest of the country. A little more than a year later, more than 80 inches of white stuff entombed the city to the south during Christmas week. In Niagara Falls, it was just another week of winter.
Whatever the reason for the disparity in savage storms, it's a very fortuitous situation for Niagara Falls, given the mismanagement of the city's Public Works Department by Mayor Vincenzo V. Anello and chums.
Turning the most basic of city services into an exercise in political gamesmanship, he's steadily gutted the Forestry Department in a transparent effort to justify his mysterious attempt to borrow $100,000 to give to an as yet unnamed contractor.
Instead of temporarily moving workers into the Forestry Department, as is the custom at this time of year, when fewer are needed in the parks and golf course division, he's demoting climbers and ordering men trained to use chainsaws to spread blacktop instead.
Crews in Buffalo worked around the clock through the weekend, clearing fallen trees and branches. Meanwhile, in Niagara Falls, winds dropped a tree across Niagara Avenue late Friday, blocking the street in the 1300 block. It was still there Sunday afternoon. Perhaps Anello and City Administrator Dan Bristol think that someone getting hurt, or worse, as a result of their inaction will convince the City Council to let His Dishonor have his way.
So, to sum up: In Buffalo, tons of wood and foliage were picked up and hauled away in a span of a few days, while in Niagara Falls, one tree was left to block a residential street to make some sort of point nobody outside City Hall could possibly fathom.
Shuttling back and forth between Buffalo and Niagara Falls through the past few days aggravated the general disorientation instilled by the most severe autumn storm in area history, one of the most violent attacks nature has ever inflicted in these parts.
Like almost three-quarters of the homes in Buffalo, ours was still without electricity at press time. Across the street, broken limbs dangle from nearly every tree in Delaware Park that didn't topple completely.
Like many Buffalonians, we sought heat and light in Niagara Falls, where most hotels and motels have been filled since Friday. Thanks to our good friend, the incredibly generous Ann Marie, who gave us the run of her cozy two-bedroom house, we've been among the most comfortable of the refugees.
With a 3-year-old who doesn't understand that the DVD player requires electricity to display his "Bear in the Big Blue House" video for the 373rd time and a 3-week-old whose sleeping and eating habits have no apparent relation to available light, Ann Marie's hospitality has been sanity-saving, at the very least. There are a couple of dogs involved we wouldn't inflict on anyone else's home. And should looters decide to pillage our street, I'd like to be there to at least try to talk them out of it. So I've been driving back to Buffalo each night and sleeping in our thankfully undamaged, if dark and cold, house.
It's sort of like camping. Really, really creepy camping.
By Sunday morning, the major thoroughfares and many side streets had been cleared of the branches and trunks that had blocked them. The rain, coupled with temperatures in the high 40s, steadily shrunk the white piles.
Unlike most storms, the damage done by this one will be felt long after the snow disappears. The view of the park will never be the same, and many of Buffalo's tree-lined streets have become tree-dotted streets.
It could be another week before everyone's power is back on, but that doesn't seem to be for a lack of effort. Driving around Buffalo over the weekend, crews from the city and National Grid were seen in every neighborhood, clearing debris and trying to fix fallen lines. Driving up the I-190 to the Falls Sunday morning, I saw a convoy of at least 20 trucks from the utility heading south across Grand Island to begin another long shift.
My friend Tim and I made a tour of Buffalo Saturday, half-jokingly wondering whether we'd see the social fabric beginning to unravel after 48 hours without electricity.
Far from it.
Jeff Benjamin from Viking Lobster on Tonawanda Street in Black Rock called to say that he was cooking everything in his refrigerator, which was putting an excessive strain on his generator. So we stopped by and joined another dozen people who stood around the kitchen devouring ribs, chicken fingers, deep-fried shrimp and Caesar salad.
"The ribs are usually better," Jeff said with a shrug. "I can't see what I'm cooking."
Absolutely no one complained.
Downtown, where most places had power, the Buffalo Sabres kept their record perfect with a 7-4 whupping of the New York Rangers, providing a welcome distraction to those who made it to HSBC Arena, as well as to thousands more huddled around battery-powered radios throughout Western New York.
Up the street at the Mohawk Place, The Voodoo Dollies, a group of strong-willed young women from Niagara Falls who play quite fast and very loud, headlined a fund-raiser for Buffalo's newborn roller derby team.
And back on Tonawanda Street, where it meets Niagara Street near the Scajaquada, there was Penny's annual 40th birthday party. The bash was in a former old-timey Buffalo tavern, last open to the public around the turn of the 21st century, which has been converted into a rehearsal space for local bands. It's across the street from a couple of abandoned warehouses and next to an old train station that's now largely vacant.
One Buffalo band, The Steam Donkeys, played into the wee hours, while partygoers shared stories of surviving a storm that absolutely no one saw coming.
Even in one of the deadest areas in a comatose city, life went on.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | October 17 2006 |