Death toll in western New York rises to 28 amid winter storm

The death toll from a Buffalo-area blizzard has risen to 28 in western New York, authorities said as the region reels from one of the worst weather-related disasters in its history.

Much of the rest of the United States was also hit by ferocious winter conditions.

Those who died around Buffalo were found in cars, homes and snowbanks.

Some died while shovelling snow, others when emergency crews could not respond in time to medical crises.

The storm is blamed for at least 50 deaths nationwide, with rescue and recovery efforts ongoing on Monday.

Erie County executive Mark Poloncarz described the blizzard as “the worst storm probably in our lifetime” and warned there may be more dead.

Some people, he noted, were stranded in their cars for over two days.

“It’s just a horrible situation that we can see sort of the light at the end of the tunnel. But this is not the end yet,” he said on Monday.

The National Weather Service said Monday that up to nine more inches of snow could fall in some areas through Tuesday.

Scientists say the climate change crisis may have contributed to the intensity of the storm.

That is because the atmosphere can carry more water vapour, which acts as fuel, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University, likened a single weather event to an “at-bat” — and the climate as your “batting average”.

“It’s hard to say,” Mr Serreze said. “But are the dice a little bit loaded now? Absolutely.”

The blizzard roared across western New York on Friday and Saturday — stranding motorists, cutting off power and preventing emergency crews from reaching residents in frigid homes and stuck cars.

With many convenience shops in the Buffalo area closed and driving bans in place, some people pleaded on social media for donations of food and nappies.

The ferocity of the whiteout conditions tested an area accustomed to punishing snow.

“It doesn’t matter if you had 1,000 more pieces of equipment and 10,000 personnel, there’s still nothing you could have done in that period. It was that bad,” Mr Poloncarz, the county official, said.

“I know it’s hard for people to believe but it was like looking at a white wall for 14 to 18 hours straight.”

Relief is coming this week, though, as forecasts call for temperatures to slowly rise, said Ashton Robinson Cook, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

“Nothing like what we had last week,” Mr Cook said, adding the bomb cyclone — when atmospheric pressure drops very quickly in a strong storm — has weakened.

It developed near the Great Lakes, stirring up blizzard conditions, including heavy winds and snow.

Extreme weather stretched from the Great Lakes near Canada down to the Rio Grande along the border with Mexico.

About 60% of the US population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians.

Some 2,085 domestic and international flights were cancelled on Monday as of about noon, according to the tracking site FlightAware.

The site said Southwest Airlines had 1,253 cancellations — nearly a third of its scheduled flights and about five times as many as any other major US carrier.

An email sent to Southwest was not immediately returned and the Dallas-based airline had not updated its website about the conditions since Saturday.

Based on FlightAware data, airports across the US were suffering from cancellations and delays, including Denver, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Seattle, Baltimore and Chicago.

“This blizzard is one for the ages. Certainly, it is the blizzard of the century,” New York governor Kathy Hochul said on Monday after touring the aftermath in her hometown of Buffalo, where almost every fire engine became stranded on Saturday.

She said the storm came a little over a month after the region was inundated with another “historic” snowfall. Between the two storms, snowfall totals are not far off from the 95.4 inches the area normally sees in an entire winter season.

The National Weather Service said the snow total at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport stood at 49.2 inches at 10am on Monday. Officials said the airport will be shut through Tuesday morning.

Buffalo mayor Byron Brown described the heartbreaking task of retrieving storm victims from cars, homes and streets.

“Our police officers are human. It is painful to find members of your community that are deceased,” the mayor said, adding the blizzard’s victims “were trying to walk out during storm conditions, got disoriented and passed away out in the street”.

In a nearby home, Shahida Muhammad told WKBW an outage knocked out power to her one-year-old son’s ventilator. She and the child’s father manually administered breaths from Friday until Sunday, when rescuers saw her social media posts and came to their aid.

Erie County officials said they went to the family’s home on Saturday but no one answered the door. Ms Muhammad said they were there but thankfully her son was doing well despite the ordeal. She described him as “a fighter”.

The storm also cut off power in communities from Maine to Seattle. The mid-Atlantic grid operator had called for its 65 million consumers to conserve energy amid the freeze on Saturday.

Storm-related deaths have been reported all over the country, from six motorists killed in crashes in Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky to a woman who fell through Wisconsin river ice and a deadly Kansas homeless camp fire.

In Jackson, Mississippi, crews struggled on Monday to get water through the capital city’s beleaguered water system, authorities said. Many areas had no water or low water pressure. On Christmas Day, residents were told to boil their drinking water due to water lines bursting in the frigid temperatures.

“The issue has to be significant leaks in the system that we have yet to identify,” the city said in a statement on Monday. City officials say the problems affect “many areas” of Jackson but have not said how many residents are without water.