Western Latest York is bracing for a historic wallop of snow that might dump 4 to six feet on the region through Sunday — including possible “thundersnow,” forecasters said.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and other state and native officials held a news conference in Buffalo on Thursday morning to induce Latest Yorkers to remain home until 7 p.m. Friday, when dangerous whiteout conditions are expected in an 11-county region stretching from the banks of Lake Erie to Watertown, north of Syracuse.
“What we’re talking about is a serious, major storm. This is taken into account an extreme event, an extreme weather event. Meaning it’s dangerous; it also means it’s life-threatening,” the Democrat warned.
Hochul had declared a state of emergency Wednesday, allowing the federal government to deploy state resources to the region and put the National Guard on standby for rescue and recovery missions.
Officials said they’d nearly 600 plows, 5,700 utility trucks and 42,000 tons of salt standing by. A 130-mile section of the Latest York State Thruway was shut all the way down to traffic starting at 4 p.m. together with secondary highways within the region.
Wind gusts approaching 40 miles per hour and snowfall of as much as 4 inches an hour were expected to make driving nearly unimaginable, officials said.
“When it’s coming down at that rate, it is sort of unimaginable to clear the road to make it secure to travel, so you could have to let the snow accumulate,” Hochul cautioned.
Forecasters warned that the condition could bring what’s generally known as “thundersnow,” a thunderstorm that accumulates snow as a substitute of rain.
The thundersnow phenomenon typically occurs early within the season when relatively warmer air rising from the surface of Lake Erie – which continues to be about 52 degrees – collides with colder air in storm clouds, generating a charge which ends up in thunder and lightning, meteorologists explained.
“When that happens, you get a variety of converging air on the surface and a variety of rising air in very narrow bands that cause very localized amounts of snow to sort of just dump out,” Fox Weather meteorologist Geoff Bansen told The Post.
“You don’t typically see a variety of light snow with events of this magnitude; a lot of the snow is moderate to heavy, and it’s only a matter of where those moderate bands arrange,” he explained.
“It may very well be whiteout conditions at point A, and you then go point B five miles up the road, it may very well be nothing.”
Jackie Bray, the commissioner of the Latest York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, said many individuals are prone to injury or death even in their very own driveways.
“Essentially the most deaths that occur during winter weather events are deaths of exertion. Over 20 people died in 2014 on this region during that snowstorm, and most of those deaths were deaths from heart attacks on account of exertion,” Bray said, referring to a different monster storm that dumped as much as 65 inches on parts of the region per week before Thanksgiving that yr.
“If you get able to shovel out, go slow, wear warm clothing and take extra breaks,” she advised.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz added, “If people exit in these conditions, they’re putting their lives in danger, and so they’re putting the lives prone to the opposite individuals who then must exit and take a look at to avoid wasting them. So please, stay home.”
School was already canceled Friday in town of Buffalo, but a Sunday Bills game had yet to be postponed outside the hardy city, where residents are used to weathering storms just like the 2014 blitz and a 2001 snowfall that dumped 56 inches of powder on residents over three days.
Still, Mayor Byron Brown warned that the most recent projections were beyond the pale.
“This is just not the conventional snow event that we get, so the general public must be patient. The general public can’t take a look at this as a mean snowfall. That is a serious snowstorm and we’re prepared for it,” he said.
