Weather Whiplash in Buffalo
The snow is no longer falling in Buffalo, New York, but the area isn’t in the clear yet. Now it must contend with another extreme: flooding. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch on Friday morning as officials warned that rain and a warm spell over the weekend could make for hazardous conditions in the area. Rain and warm temperatures will raise the risk of roof collapses and flooding on area creeks and streams.
The storm death toll rose to 13 on Friday. Although official NWS weekly totals have not yet come in, it’s likely that this week’s snowfall will go down in history as one of the largest Lake Erie lake-effect snow events on record. Some locations have likely received about 100 inches of snow in just five days, which is about equal to the typical annual snowfall totals for these communities.
The massive snow pack now on the ground is storing a significant amount of water, which will be released starting this weekend and going into early next week as air temperatures warm and rain moves into the area from a new weather system. The NWS expects air temperatures to rise above freezing by Saturday afternoon, and increase up to 60 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday. That’s a serious bout of weather whiplash, since it’s about a 50-degree Fahrenheit or more swing from the typical high temperatures this week.
The NWS office in Buffalo included this wording in its flood watch statement on Friday morning:
AT FIRST THE SNOWPACK WILL ABSORB MUCH OF THE WATER FROM THE SNOW MELT. HOWEVER AS THE SNOWPACK RIPENS…AND WITH THE ADDITION OF A HALF INCH OR SO OF RAINFALL SUNDAY NIGHT AND MONDAY…THE POTENTIAL FOR FLOODING WILL RAPIDLY INCREASE.
PEOPLE LIVING IN AREAS PRONE TO FLOODING…AND WHERE SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW FELL SHOULD TAKE TIME IN ADVANCE OF THE WARMING TO PREPARE FOR THE POTENTIAL FOR SIGNIFICANT FLOODING EARLY NEXT WEEK. IN ADDITION TO CREEKS AND SMALL STREAMS FLOODING THEIR BANKS…WIDESPREAD FLOODING IS POSSIBLE ACROSS TOWNS WHERE SEVERAL FEET OF SNOW FELL.
Updated W. New York lake #snow totals since Monday… and new records broken in Michigan.
— The Weather Channel November 21, 2014
Dozens of roofs collapsed in the Buffalo area overnight as heavy snow piled up.
Crews have removed more than 1,200 truckloads of snow from South Buffalo, amounting to more than 24,000 tons, according to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown.
The deaths in western New York were mostly due to heart attacks and exposure. The most recent victims were two elderly residents of a nursing home that was evacuated amid concerns of a roof collapse, Deputy Erie County Executive Richard Tobe said Friday.
— Mark Poloncarz (@markpoloncarz) November 21, 2014
With many roads still impassable, National Guardsmen drove nurses to hospital shifts. State troopers helped elderly residents trapped in their homes. State officials assembled 463 plows, 129 loaders and 40 dump trucks from across the state for a massive cleanup effort. The warm temperatures and rain may make cleanup more difficult, by turning the relatively light and fluffy snowpack into a denser, wetter mass.
Some Buffalo-area schools were closed for the fourth day on Friday, burning through snow days with winter still a month away.
Because the Buffalo area is so snowy, building codes require homes and businesses to be able to handle up to 50 pounds per square foot on their roofs, which would be about as heavy as a slab of concrete 4 inches thick, according to Mark Bajorek, a structural engineer.
