Behind The Snow

By the third day of Winter Storm Knife, the worst blizzard Western New York had experienced since 1977, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz had cumulatively gotten some four hours of sleep since the first flake had fallen. As the storm grew progressively more fierce—seeing the weather pattern on a map, Poloncarz had remarked that its shape resembled a “knife,” and the name caught on with television stations, which appreciated the evocative image—the county executive had been frantically trying to find a way to keep the main roads in the area clear enough to drive, even though hundreds of abandoned cars lined the streets, stuck in five feet of snow. At the same time, Poloncarz was balancing the responsibility of providing the public up-to-date information about the crisis with coordinating an army of government employees and relief workers to provide food and medicine to the county’s most vulnerable residents. 

“I felt bad for the guy,” said Patrick Burke, a Democrat who represents in the Erie County Legislature the district that was most snowbound. “He looked terrible. But he kept working through it the whole way through. He was one of the electeds who really worked at it. Just doing the grunt work. There was no glamour in it. It was just an  exhausting process. … I think he was fantastic.” 

Exhausted and pushed to his limits, Poloncarz was wrung out when he got the news that the Buffalo Bills were intending to go forward with playing their scheduled home game against the New York Jets, and something inside him snapped. It seemed inconceivable: The Bills were essentially inciting their fans to violate the driving bans he and other civic leaders had put in place as a safety measure, by publicizing an offer to give $10 an hour and free tickets to the game to anyone who came down to Ralph Wilson Stadium to help shovel it out. 

Poloncarz, who said he has a “good relationship” with the team, suspected that the National Football League was responsible for pressuring the Bills to keep the game on, so he decided to do some blocking and tackling on his own. At a press conference early the next morning, he deviated from his usual admonitions—advice along the lines of “Check up on your senior citizen neighbors” and “Make sure your natural gas heater is not backing up carbon monoxide into your house”—to denounce the NFL in no uncertain terms. “The NFL is a business. It’s as simple as that, folks. … If the NFL is trying to push the Bills to hold a football game while we’re in the middle of an emergency, shame on the NFL. 

“We’ve had eight deaths,” Poloncarz continued. “We still might have people in their vehicles. We’ve had roofs collapsing. We were just touring a facility where there were a couple hundred patients at a nursing home where there was seven feet of snow, with another two feet potential, on a flat roof. … Shame on the NFL!” 

Later that day, facing additional pressure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had called the notion of going forward with the game “impractical,” the NFL quietly moved the game to Detroit. 

Much has been made of Gov. Cuomo’s hands-on approach to Winter Storm Knife, which riveted the nation with its seven-foot-high snowdrifts and extraordinary images of buildings and cars rendered practically unrecognizable by a gargantuan blanket of white, and by practically all accounts—other than his dustup with Al Roker and a host of meteorologists over how much warning the National Weather Service had provided about the storm’s severity—the governor handled the blizzard exemplarily. Mayor Byron Brown also earned the plaudits he received for his role in digging South Buffalo out from the snow. 

But according to on- and off-the-record interviews conducted by City & State with more than a dozen local leaders and public officials from both parties, it was Poloncarz who really deserves the most credit for holding Erie County together in the direst of circumstances. 

“It was remarkable, the government response,” said Erie County Legislator Kevin Hardwick, a Republican. “Especially the county. The executive struck the right tone. He was unambiguous.” 

How did Poloncarz pull off such a feat of emergency management? What lessons might other officials benefit from to deal with future catastrophes? City & State met with the executive in his office on the 16th floor of the Rath Building in downtown Buffalo, and asked him to share, moment by moment, the problems the storm hurled at him, and what he did to solve them. 

CALM BEFORE THE STORM 

Growing up in the Erie County city of Lackawanna, and having spent most of his life in Buffalo, Poloncarz is no stranger to winter storms. Indeed, before Knife hit, the executive had already dug the county out of two blizzards that same year. So when, on the evening of Sunday, Nov. 16, he got a warning from the National Weather Service that a storm was going to drop two or three feet of snow on the region the following day, he took the report in stride. He assembled all of his emergency staff in a meeting the next day at noon, opened an emergency operations center in the town of Cheektowaga, and sent out a fleet of 40 trucks to salt the main county roads. 

Meanwhile, the media began calling his office, nervously asking how bad the storm would be and how the county was preparing for it. Poloncarz arranged a press conference for 4 p.m., but just minutes before he was to address the media, he received a follow-up from the National Weather Service. 

“I know the exact time,” Poloncarz says: “At 3:53, we got a new warning … that said the snow, which is going to start falling at 5 o’clock, could now be falling at up to three to five inches an hour, and we’re not exactly certain where it’s going to go.” 

Immediately Poloncarz understood he was about to be hit with a significantly bigger challenge than he had anticipated. After the press conference was over, he instructed all his staff to go home and make sure they got a good night’s sleep. Not following his own advice, he chose to remain behind at the office. 

The snow arrived right on time, quickly draping the county in white. By midnight, Poloncarz knew that the storm had hit with a vengeance. His office started getting reports of road closures and travel advisories. New York State shut down U.S. Route 219 and New York State Route 400. At 2:30 a.m., the Thruway was closed. 

Still, the situation was not quite a disaster—at least not yet. “Through 6, 6:30 in the morning, we had most of the major routes clear,” Poloncarz says. “By then there were driving bans in place. … Then people started driving to work. They couldn’t leave the areas where it was snowing, ’cause they were getting so much snow. … But the major routes got clogged up as people started driving into the area.” 

The heavy truck traffic became a particular mess. When state officials closed the Thruway, dozens of trucks driving up from Pennsylvania simply rerouted over to NY 5 and US 20 and kept trying to push on toward Buffalo. They promptly got stuck in the snow. Countless numbers of stranded semis began to clog a major road, blocking access even to the plows needed to free them. 

Similar scenes would play out across the area. Within one 24-hour period, roughly 1,000 vehicles were abandoned on roads all over the county. By the time the storm came to an end, Erie County officials had towed more than 800 vehicles. 

Poloncarz first saw the extent of the crisis with his own eyes from a car en route to the county’s emergency operations center. As he and a staffer drove south, they plunged into deeper and deeper snow. Calling ahead to the operations center for a status report, he was told not to bother coming: Abandoned cars were cutting off all the access roads to the center. A glum Poloncarz had no choice but to turn around and head back to his office in Buffalo. 

Upon his return, Poloncarz formally declared a state of emergency for the impacted sections of the county. (Later that day Gov. Cuomo would declare a state of emergency for all of Western New York.) The declaration expanded Poloncarz’s executive powers, and he immediately used this new authority to order driving bans on all of the county roads affected by the storm. Consulting with his highway and public works commissioners, he learned that the county did not have enough trucks and plows to deal with a blizzard of such magnitude, so he used his emergency powers to contract with a legion of private tow truck and snowplow companies to provide reinforcements—a decision he would not normally have been able to make without the approval of the county Legislature. 

“At that point, we knew we were in over our heads,” Poloncarz recalled, “so I called the governor and requested that he mobilize the National Guard. I said, ‘Governor, I wouldn’t ask for it unless I need[ed] it.’” 

Poloncarz had another request for Gov. Cuomo. The county executive had already asked the state Department of Transportation for as much help as it could spare to battle the blizzard, but the DOT had not been particularly responsive. 

“Sometimes dealing with state agencies isn’t easy,” Poloncarz noted. “I told [the governor] on Wednesday night that we were having a problem getting the resources we need from the Department of Transportation. I know they need to work on their roads. But you’re bringing in hundreds of additional pieces of equipment. We could use some of that elsewhere. And the governor said, ‘I’ll fix this.’ ” Swiftly thereafter, according to Poloncarz, the governor made good on his word. 

Presented with the executive’s account of what transpired, Beau Duffy, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation, declared the staff and equipment provided by DOT of historic scope. “Under the governor’s direction at the start of the lake effect storm, NYSDOT and other state agencies made an unprecedented commitment of equipment and manpower to Western New York specifically to help localities respond,” Duffy says. “The Department deployed all available resources from other regions of the state before the storm, and continued to aid localities and was in constant close contact with the localities throughout the entire process.” 

THE SECOND BLAST 

By the end of Tuesday, the situation had started to turn around. A road to the operations center had been cleared, and Poloncarz and some of his staff were finally able to drive to the center and centralize emergency efforts. But a new question had arisen: where to put all the snow that was being removed? Poloncarz worked the phones, signing short-term leases with major businesses to let the county unload the snow in their parking lots. He even dumped piles of snow in the old Seneca mall. 

On Wednesday Erie County caught a bit of a break. The storm had moved north, giving the hard-hit southern part of the county, which now lay buried underneath as much as four feet of snow, a respite of about eight hours. The cities were still essentially paralyzed, of course. According to Mike Schmand, the executive director of the not-for-profit business improvement organization Buffalo Place, downtown Buffalo was virtually empty. Many of the corporate businesses in the area were not particularly hard hit because their employees could work from home, but for the sandwich shops, the restaurants and the parking lots that depend upon that clientele, the losses were profound. Their situation was made all the worse by the fact that many of the lower-income people who work in those establishments live in the Southtowns, a suburb of Buffalo so ravaged by the storm that many of its residents were shut in at their homes. 

And then Poloncarz got the news: Gov. Cuomo was flying in to Buffalo to personally take stock of the situation. Upon arriving, the governor asked Poloncarz if he could tour the areas hardest hit by the storm. Poloncarz explained that there was no way to safely access them; Cuomo would have to settle for visiting the operations center and reviewing whether the state and county agencies were working together effectively. 

The first reports of deaths started trickling in. A man trapped in his car had died of exposure. Most of the other fatalities were seniors who had suffered heart attacks from the exertion of trying to dig their way out of their homes. Poloncarz was so alarmed that he called his 71-year-old father, who still lives in Lackawanna, and cautioned him to stay far away from his snow shovel. 

Initially Poloncarz was told the governor would fly back to Albany at the end of the day. When Cuomo saw the full extent of the damage, however, he decided to remain in Buffalo to personally ensure the disaster was dealt with properly. (Poloncarz says a rumor that Cuomo secretly flew back to Albany every night is false; the governor stayed at the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel.) Meanwhile, the National Guard started arriving. Eventually 400 guardsmen would be on the scene—bringing with them 40 pieces of snow equipment. 

That night, the storm returned to the Southtowns and pummeled the area with another two feet of snow. Still, the road crews had been able to clear a good number of the main thoroughfares before the second round of the storm, so the next morning Poloncarz, who had been operating on a few hours of sleep a night, finally got a chance to tour the hardest hit areas. 

“It was bad. It really was bad,” he recalled. “Seven feet of snow. Where you were moving the snow it was seven feet on top of five or six feet where they were pushing it, so you had 12 feet of snow. … We took a tour of the Thruway and saw dozens and dozens of abandoned tractor-trailers and vehicles. You wouldn’t recognize there was a vehicle there. It just looked like a big snowdrift.” 

Once more officials had to triage, prioritizing which roads they had to clear all over again. The state went to work on US 219, Interstate 90, and the Thruway, while the county focused on roads around medical centers before moving on to the main local roads, and finally the residential streets. 

Beginning on Wednesday, a number of panicked leaders of southern Erie County municipalities began to call Poloncarz, begging for assistance. Where was the county when they needed it? they asked, claiming they did not have the resources to deal with the crisis. These grievances got Poloncarz’s back up: In fact, the county did have a system in place to help small towns and villages. Known as the Disaster Local Access Network (DLAN), the system is an Internet communication network designed to help local official inform the county about what they need and where they need help the most. Yet according to Poloncarz, many town leaders never signed up for the network— or never used it during the storm despite Poloncarz’s previous public recommendations that they learn how to do so. 

“Town supervisors on Wednesday, village mayors, city mayors, were like, ‘We don’t know what to do! We can’t handle this!’ ” Poloncarz recounted. “I said, ‘Have you hired contractors? Are you using our countywide DLAN system to report what you need? Are you participating in our conference calls?’ And some were and others were not. … The town of Boston [and] the town of Hamburg never used our DLAN disaster system once during the storm. The town of Orchard Park didn’t at first, but then it did, and they started getting equipment.” 

David Rood, the acting mayor of Orchard Park since John Wilson’s sudden death on Nov. 5; Steven Walters, supervisor of the town of Hamburg; and Martin Ballowe, the town of Boston’s supervisor, are all Republicans. But Poloncarz also criticized his fellow Democrat Geoffrey Szymanski, the mayor of Lackawanna, for his response to the storm. 

“We didn’t hear anything from [Lackawanna] for the first 24 hours or so. They weren’t using the DLAN system. I finally called … Szymanski, and said, ‘Who’s your emergency manager running the show there other than yourself?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, my emergency manager retired a month ago.’ ‘Have you appointed a new emergency manager?’ He says, ‘No, I haven’t.’ ” 

Szymanski, Walters and Ballowe did not return repeated requests for comment for this story but a number of Southtowns’ highway superintendents have told The Buffalo News that the DLAN system does not work very well, and that the county was simply too slow in getting around to helping them. In addition, Walters and Ballowe are reportedly considering the possibility of setting up their own system to coordinate snowplowing resources in the future. 

WEAK LINK? 

While all this squabbling was going on, the basic, plodding work of clearing the roads continued. Eventually state and county officials worked out an efficient strategy for tackling the complex problems posed by snowdrifts taller than basketball players and roadways littered with abandoned vehicles. 

First, workers pushed the abandoned vehicles as far from the center of the blockaded roads as they could. That effort opened up an empty expanse in the middle of the roads, which was then plowed, creating a single working lane. Next, tow trucks would drive in and haul off the abandoned cars to holding areas, enabling snowplows to come in and deal with the rest of the snow. It was monotonous, repetitive work that went on and on. But it worked. Over the next few days, all the driving bans in Erie County were lifted. 

New York City residents who endured the Bloomberg administration’s botched response to a December 2010 blizzard that paralyzed outer borough streets for days after the storm understand only too well that the rapid, thorough and tireless response to Winter Storm Knife pulled off by Erie County in conjunction with the state was not a given. 

At the time the storm first really blasted into Western New York around midnight on Nov. 18, Poloncarz’s emergency management team consisted of eight people, all of whom were trapped in the county’s emergency operations center by a wall of snow. Four days later hundreds of National Guardsmen were on the streets. Hundreds more county workers and state DOT employees were working the snowplows. The Niagara County sheriff dispatched his team to the storm-ravaged areas to hand-deliver food and medicine to shut-ins. Over at Poloncarz’s ops center, senior state transportation officials swarmed about, coordinating with their county counterparts, while the governor stood watch in a corner of the room. 

Only one relevant official never seemed to be present or particularly engaged in addressing the crisis, Poloncarz notes: Erie County Sheriff Timothy Howard, a Republican with whom Poloncarz has butted heads in the past. While careful to single out Howard’s undersheriff, Mark Wipperman, for praise, Poloncarz made clear in his remarks about Howard how he felt the sheriff himself had handled the storm. 

Howard had been snowed in for the first two days of the storm, Poloncarz acknowledged, carefully noting that he had seen the sheriff once or twice during the crisis. Asked directly if he was disappointed in Howard’s performance, however, Poloncarz answered pointedly. 

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen this. But the sheriff and I get along. I just wish he was there more often.” 

Responding to Poloncarz’s comments, Howard spokesman Scott Zylka said, “The sheriff was snowed in Tuesday and Wednesday morning, and the undersheriff assumed command for emergency management. The sheriff himself did come to the sheriff’s office Wednesday and Thursday to handle the jail management division. We have about 1,200 inmates. We had some of the same problems that other people had: getting food to the inmates. Somebody still had to conduct the day-to-day operations of the sheriff’s office. And when the sheriff did have some spare time, he went out of his way to deliver food to Meals on Wheels clients. We just didn’t make a press release out of that.” 

THE AFTERMATH 

Once the snow had finally stopped, and the roads were clear enough for life in southern Erie County to largely return to normal, there was one last crisis with which to grapple, and it arose in the space of 24 hours: flooding. The weather in the region in November is generally too warm for a mountain of snow to melt gradually, and sure enough, the weekend forecast predicted that the temperature would spike to above 50 degrees. All that snow was going melt, and the resulting water would have to go somewhere. 

After the blizzard in January of this year, Erie County had experienced severe flooding along Buffalo and Cazenovia creeks, so officials had a strong sense of where to refocus their response. The extraordinary arsenal of equipment marshaled to battle the blizzard would be of no use in taking on a deluge of water. According to Poloncarz, Gov. Cuomo turned on a dime to mobilize an entirely new genus of emergency equipment: generators, pumps, boats and 100,000 sandbags. Prisoners from the nearby Wende Correctional Facility were brought in to fill the sandbags. County sewer workers dismantled their own pumps and raced in to have them at the ready. The only thing left to do was wait for the snow to melt. 

All through Saturday and Sunday, a legion of workers waited at the ready. While hundreds of prisoners and county employees sat on the banks of the creeks, the historic volume of snow, plus inches of rain that fell over the weekend, gushed harmlessly down into the storm drains. 

Just like that, the worst blizzard in 37 years washed away without further incident. 

It was all over except the accounting. Thirteen people had died. Erie County had spent roughly $7.5 million fighting the storm, much of it in hiring private tow truck and snowplow companies. Hundreds of abandoned vehicles crowded impromptu impound lots, and the county had to process ownership claims for all of them. 

The storm had done more than disrupt the lives of thousands of Erie County residents. It had also done damage to many people’s personal finances. Most workers do not get paid if they cannot show up for work. Homes were damaged, and negotiating insurance claims will not be pleasant. Price gougers at gas stations and grocery stores dug deep into panicked residents’ pockets. To address some of these issues, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently announced a comprehensive consumer protection plan. His office sent a letter to local utilities, banks and other creditors, calling on them to temporarily suspend late fees for people caught in the storm. The AG’s Buffalo regional office has set up an “escalations unit” to advise people on consumer matters, such as which general contractors can be trusted to reputably perform repairs. Schneiderman has also set up a unit to investigate local businesses accused of price gouging. 

Now that Erie County has put the worst of the storm behind them, officials across the political spectrum marvel at how much more severe the crisis could have been— particularly if Mark Poloncarz had not been in charge. 

“I thought he did an awesome job,” said Buffalo developer Carl Paladino, the GOP’s 2010 gubernatorial nominee. “He showed great leadership, he was incisive, he kept his head, and I commend him for it. … With Mark, you felt confident that the thing was being solved, and I commend him for it.” 

Joel Giambra, a Republican who served as Erie County Executive from 2000 to 2007 and led the county’s response to many storms, said that when a crisis of this magnitude hits, you find out pretty quickly whether your leaders are incompetent hacks or solid material. For Giambra there is no question where Poloncarz stands on the spectrum. 

“I think he handled it admirably,” Giambra said. “He showed leadership, he showed poise under pressure—and believe me, there are a lot of things going on. Being in that command center, being in that epicenter, you either rise to the occasion or you don’t. Mark did.” 

CORRECTION: After the story was posted, Poloncarz spokesman Peter Anderson issued this statement in regards to our reporting that the Town of Hamburg did not use the DLAN system: "During the interview, the County Executive inadvertently mentioned the Town of Hamburg as not using the DLAN system, which was a misstatement."