How a deadly blizzard forced a snow-hardy city to reckon with disaster risks

Buffalo is snow-hardy, its residents accustomed to more than 7 feet of it in an average winter. But last December, a blizzard still overwhelmed it. Whiteout conditions and 15-foot snowdrifts stranded even snowplows and ambulances, and trapped residents in place for days, killing dozens of them.

“We were exposed,” Common Council member Rasheed N.C. Wyatt (D) said. “The blizzard showed us we weren’t prepared.”

For Wyatt and other city leaders, one problem was obvious: No one in city government was squarely focused on disaster preparations and responses, contributing to major gaps in communication and coordination as blizzard impacts hit. Such issues are common in communities across the country battered by increasingly intense weather extremes, according to experts in emergency management.

Now, Buffalo is demonstrating what happens when a disaster overwhelms preparations so dramatically that reforms become essential in the aftermath.

After nearly a year of debate and a long search for candidates, the city has hired leaders to manage Buffalo’s emergency response and its fleet of snowplows and emergency vehicles. In greater Erie County, which includes Buffalo, officials are buying more vehicles capable of traversing such extreme snowstorms. In the future, they plan to be more liberal in alerting residents to hazards using a federal emergency warning system via their cellphones.

“You don’t know what you need until you need it, unfortunately,” Wyatt said.

But those who specialize in emergency management said they hope tragedies like Buffalo’s underscore the growing importance of anticipating disaster risks instead of relying on hindsight to justify reforms.

Reviews of what went wrong in so many disasters show gaps in communication, coordination and preparation, said Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. That doesn’t mean the lessons always prompt action.

“That does not happen after every single disaster,” she said.

An extreme storm, even by Buffalo standards

Even for Buffalo, where lake-effect snows commonly dump accumulations measured in feet, the blizzard that enveloped the region nearly a year ago was extreme.

When the storm arrived the morning of Dec. 22, visibility quickly dropped close to zero as gusts exceeding 70 mph whipped up heavy snow. The winds were so violent, National Weather Service meteorologists said, they “shredded” snowflakes as they fell. The whiteout conditions immediately stranded those caught in the elements despite warnings of a “once-in-a-generation type of” storm.

For 37 hours, through Christmas Day, the blizzard made travel impossible even for emergency vehicles. Buffalo warned residents Dec. 24 that there were “no emergency services available” in the city and several other towns.

“This was the most intense blizzard in the U.S. not on a mountaintop,” said Ben Swanekamp, chief of staff to Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz (D).

The storm’s impact was so severe that it revealed lessons “even during the incident itself,” Swanekamp said.

But there would still be extensive review to determine what could have saved lives. The storm killed 47 people across Erie and Niagara counties, many of them found trapped in cars, snowbanks or homes that lacked heat.

One report commissioned by Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown (D) found that the city did not do enough to protect its most vulnerable residents, including those who were still out as the storm hit - despite a travel ban some criticized as too late - because they needed food.

The report, conducted by researchers at New York University, recommended that the city improve its public communications around emergencies, revamp some public infrastructure to better withstand weather extremes, and improve relationships with community groups and local, state and federal agencies.

After nearly a year, Buffalo takes action

For city leaders such as Common Council member Mitch Nowakowski (D), investment in emergency management was an obvious solution - making a single person responsible for overseeing those tasks. In proposing the city hire an emergency manager, Nowakowski cited not just the December 2022 blizzard, but also a November snowstorm and the mass shooting carried out by a white supremacist at a Buffalo grocery store earlier that year.

“I think we need to have things a little more streamlined and kind of have that manager at the helm,” council member Chris Scanlon (D) told local television station WKBW.

Brown took immediate steps after the blizzard to establish a fleet manager position, responsible for keeping the city’s snowplows and other emergency equipment at the ready. But the mayor at first expressed some resistance to hiring an emergency manager, noting that the city fire commissioner had oversight of emergencies.

“I would be open to both positions, although we currently have a system for managing emergencies,” he told WKBW in January through a spokesperson. “I do think fleet management is the most immediate need.”

In February, the Common Council created the emergency manager position anyway, along with the fleet manager role.

It didn’t get filled until Halloween, when Brown announced that Thomas Luby, who was serving as a New York City fire captain on Sept. 11, 2001, would take the job.

“I am confident that the city, in conjunction with our partners in county and state government, will be as ready as possible for anything mother nature throws our way,” Brown said in a statement.

In his own statement, Luby said his “experience and training will enable me to hit the ground running.”

A nation unprepared for emergencies

Why did take a deadly blizzard and some 10 months for Buffalo to take those steps? Experts say it’s a common course of events, one that is representative of a larger gap in the way communities size up emergencies.

First, the value of an emergency manager isn’t always immediately clear because the job is still considered “an immature profession,” said Kelly McKinney, a former deputy commissioner of New York City’s emergency management department. That is especially true in places that haven’t experienced a community-rocking event.

The idea is that an emergency manager can better plan for disasters, assessing what is needed across many different agencies, from public safety to health to public works to transportation. When a situation like the Buffalo blizzard overwhelms one or more of those government functions, it is an emergency manager’s job to oversee how government can fill in the gaps and prioritize actions that keep people safest.

Considering how often disasters are hitting communities flat-footed across the country, local and state governments are “wildly underinvesting” in emergency management, Montano said. By how much is not precisely clear, because states and localities all fund, organize and staff emergency management efforts in different ways. Montano said she and other researchers spent a year going through budgets without finding a straightforward answer.

But after so many crises, post-disaster reviews reveal communication and coordination problems that make the need for better preparations clear.

“Almost always in the aftermath of a disaster, there will be an intensive review of what happened, and the outcome of it will be that the coordination was inadequate,” McKinney said. “We need to right-size that team.”

Solving that problem is no simple task, with the need for emergency managers only growing and a scarcity of people equipped for the job.

“Even FEMA now is running into the challenge,” said Russell Strickland, president of the National Emergency Management Association and secretary of emergency management in Maryland. “They don’t have the number of people they need when they actually need them.”

In the past, government leaders have often tapped public safety officials to lead emergency management work - retired police or fire chiefs, for example, Strickland said. But their ranks aren’t enough, especially given a high rate of burnout in the stressful field.

At the same time, opportunities for higher education in emergency management have been growing - but perhaps not fast enough, Strickland said.

‘We need to learn from this experience’

In Buffalo, the blizzard became what is known as a “focusing event,” Montano said.

Whether because of a high death toll or a clear failure to respond adequately, certain disasters have the power to prompt reforms. Montano said that “it’s not surprising” to see action to improve emergency preparation in Buffalo, though that was not guaranteed.

“The majority of disasters that happen do not become these focusing events,” she said.

Though it took longer to enact changes than Nowakowski had hoped, he said what’s most important is that investment has now been made.

“It’s easy to point fingers and charge blame to people, but it takes responsible adults to say, ‘We need to learn from this experience,’” he said.

“I do believe that Buffalo will be better prepared for our next weather emergency,” Nowakowski added. “You’ve got to start somewhere.”