The Blizzard of Seventy-Seven

The winter of nineteen seventy-six to nineteen seventy-seven was already severe before the blizzard arrived. Buffalo had received nearly one hundred fifty inches of snow by the end of January, against a typical seasonal total of roughly one hundred. Lake Erie had frozen solid months earlier than usual. The snow was everywhere, packed and drifted, and the frozen lake had become a reservoir of ice that would play its own role in what came next.

On January twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, the wind began. It built through the day into near-hurricane strength, gusting to sixty-nine miles per hour by the worst hours of the storm. What the wind did was pick up the snow already on the ground, including the snow compressed on the frozen surface of Lake Erie, and transport it. The lake's snowpack became airborne and descended on western New York in walls of white that reduced visibility to nothing.

The National Weather Service recorded daily peak gusts of forty-six to sixty-nine miles per hour sustained over five consecutive days. The actual snowfall during the blizzard was twelve inches over those five days. The drifts, in some places, reached thirty to forty feet. They were not new snow. They were the old winter, rearranged.

Thirteen thousand people were trapped in downtown Buffalo buildings for days. Twenty-three people died in western New York directly from the storm. Emergency services could not reach many of them. The National Guard was deployed. So were Army airborne troops, Air Force units, and Marines.

President Jimmy Carter declared it a federal disaster, the first time in American history that a President used that designation for a winter storm. The precedent mattered. It established that a storm could be severe enough to justify federal emergency authority before the damage could be tallied.

The snow melted. The city resumed. There are people in Buffalo who will tell you that they remember that week as the strangest weather of their lives, and they have spent those lives in a city that takes weather seriously.